grossly sincere

Hazelnut and chocolate melts in a paper cup on a sticky-hot-glue day,
Limbs brushing against one another in the cool darkness, silent and still and touching, sometimes--
You, whose heartbeat I trace up your arm and up and around your neck,
You, and the way your skin suggests nice muscle and rubbery cartilage and strong bone, your ordinary organs, your voice, all wrapped up and holding
You, whose face I’ve seen beneath lax eyelids and wish-filled eyelashes—
You, under the collision of cloud and sky, bathing in lavender and blush and flashes of golden sun, “beautiful boy,” I think, and I just want to take a picture of
                                                    You—and we exit out of opposite ends of the parking lot,
                      The sun is sinking into the expanse of trees I’ve never looked up from, next to where the cattails could tickle me as I run and run and run,
Sprinting parallel and in a blur of asphalt, wood, metal
                     The kiss of a cigarette butt, dry cotton sticky on wet lips
                                Dizzy and swerving.

“best wishes” scrawled on a postcard undelivered, tucked inside the pages of a book of poetry,
And the hundreds and hundreds of miles between you and me is felt like
                the back of my sneakers digging into my heel, worn and weathered and well-traveled, roaming cement and clambering down rocks on the coast
	                 or the bone-deep wind chill after stepping into the autumnal                     evening, bewildered and heart slipped out of my fingers
		                  or the standing around as trains fly in and out of the station, people spilling out of cars, going home from work and play—again, the shoes that hurt me—
				          Or the stringing along of words into sentences in zero gravity and floating bubbles in nothingness.

Me, whose thoughts exist in melodies, “it all comes out wrong, unless I put it in a song”
                     Me, in the frigid night, warmth derived from alcohol pumping through veins under muscle and skin and clothing,
                                Me and the empty card stowed in a junk drawer, words escaping when pen reaches for paper, for fear of fate loosening its thread—

Tenuous gestures across the beltway, sonar searching for small satisfaction,
Untouchable, you and me,
The sun and the moon and the stars and the waves and wishes at 11:11 for no reason at all,
destined—me, you—chance and happenstance,
dead-ended and disrupted and disintegrating, dying stars staring down at us,
just for you.