Dear Poet:

 

I watch you tip your head back to face the breeze,

I watch you devour pieces of peaches with no concern for pretense.

Your summertime gaze, the starlight on your shoulders,

Your eternal sunshine smile and paper thin eyelids I long to

press my mouth to. I watch and let myself get swept up

In your riptide gaze and the juncture between jaw and throat.

 

We sit on the shore of a vast and unknowable ocean

(two voyagers,

on the verge of an unpredictable Odyssey.)

with the boardwalk at our backs. We hover at the top of

an invisible ferris wheel with nothing to hold us. Young roses

bloom across our faces and fireworks,

or perhaps grenades, explode above our heads and behind our eyes

and between our teeth. Our hearts beat out of sync--

the moon hangs crooked. The flush of my face is hot enough

To be uncomfortable and the space between our palms is

sticky with sweat.

 

“Have a bite?” you say it with the sweetest lilt like you

aren’t offering me the earth in your hand with downy skin

and its pit peeking out at me ever so shyly.

We are quiet and I wish you’d say what you mean-

that human speech could for once be comprised of

words and their denotations like it was meant to be.

 

I sit suspended in space with only my breath and yours

To remind me that time is still turning.

The world is still whirling and my insides are curling;

We smile and my heart the size of a fist swells and tells me

That summer is always the shortest season.

 

(You and I are

Afraid of falling.

But the moral of the story, Poet,

Is that we keep ourselves afloat.)