a taste

It’s like it’s late, though it’s really all a blur. The waking and sleepwalking, the calendar on shuffle as I scuff and crumble. I’m bedded down more for comfort than sleep. Alone in a cold room, with the pain of the beatings and the ache for old lovers warm against my skin. Oh, this ancient craving. Oh, this first falling always waiting on my lips. My world has gone to unread threads and run on blues. Thinking about the way you kiss, missing the taste of you. 

The night is always hanging around. The words crowd around polishing the want, the words pile on reaching at the ache. Fitful and ridiculous, I cut quite the figure for the tools at hand, the outlandish dreamer tilting windmills in the toss and turn. The stars are out there if you look. You looking is what I think of when I see them.

It’s not as if you’re in my dreams: you need sleep for dreaming. It’s not as if you haunt my days: mostly I’m my own ghost. A pronoun for the apostrophe. The way I am always sitting close, saying these things out loud, the sound part of the story of the ways we’re found out. I sigh despite the artifice, always half down for the count, half in a trance. The sticking of the invocation, the waking to almost hearing you speak. The distinctions in your breath, the ending only what you do next.