gravewell

It's not working, you know.  He thinks this as they lie on the couch, stretched out and bunched together because the space is just enough if they pretend to be one person instead of two.  We're just falling into this faster than we expected -- honestly, I don't see how things can one-eighty and go back to normal.  He passes the tips of his fingers over her hair, the thin threads catching between the spaces the way she slips her arms around his torso from behind, laughing in his ear. I do want to be friends.  The air passes in and out of her so thinly he blinks and wonders if she's still breathing. 

some evenings, i wish my emotions were shoes, with nerve endings that i could untie until tomorrow, when i would double-knot them and trudge on. on a night like this, i would look down at them, caked in mud and soul wearing thin, and i would throw them in the back of the closet. curtains drawn, i would retreat to my bed, forgetting to set the alarm.

i dreamt you were a candle, standing silent by the window pane. the house was dark and i stood naked in your blonde glow. you sang songs of light and shadow on my frame, echoing in the curves. noticing the reservoir at your wick, i held you up to my nose, breathing in your warm vanilla skin. i tilted your base. your fingers burned as they traced patterns down my chest, my stomach, beyond. i will lay back, watch you dance with your reflection, feel your fingers clench my flesh, holding me close in a night without moons...

constellations are when the stars gather to gossip about why the moon looks so smug...

hold me up to the light and you will find her smudged around my heart-- a tangled interstate of fingerprints with no exits.

"a british boy, scotland, and a bottle of red wine. that's so much more romantic than my situation." no, i want to tell her, romance would be the last shot of wild turkey, the sound of the player piano accompanying the percussion of boot heels with the high-hat tap of our spurs as we empty the saloon. romance would be the steady gaze of the noonday sun as one of us walked ten paces closer to God; the pregnant pause after the orgasm of gunfire before i finally dropped my remington. and romance would be the lover's care he would take in placing my hat over my face, as though she herself were doing it. there was nothing rom

You lie there, deep in sleep, your hand resting upon the pillow: curled, just so, a scroll waiting for my attention. I reach out to unroll it, stretching this map to yourself upon the cotton. Your palm feels like newly-scraped vellum beneath my touch, a map drawn and re-drawn every night by an unseen cartographer who knows how to read the sextant that follows an ever-changing sun. Now I read those lines, my fingertips dancing like a navigator's compass over the meridians of the heart and the mind, skipping across the time zones of years that were, are, and yet to pass. Here and there the latitudes of destiny and the longitudes of fate inter