I want to draw a picture of what you mean to me
but I’m a piss poor artist, even with word-brushes.
I want to tell you I cherish you in horrible rhymes
and uneven meter, broken up with old caesuras,
some lines even you wouldn’t read, you, who open
like a lover’s thighs upon a kiss so sweaty sweeping
one arm that you wrap around my neck like a question.
But there are no images I could draw that would satisfy,
none that would show you in corseted simmering glee,
no photograph of you remembering me remembering
and reminding me of those lilting moments in chance,
like when I watched your toes, painted pastel greens,
sink in the sand, like clutching a dream-almost-daylight,
even as you imagined sharks beneath the water’s edge.
And the blue of sky-diving eyes straight into mine, rush,
who can paint that color of flame upon the chill of a sea?
We breathe but not with our lungs, only our finger tips
like smoldering ice, the heat of the frozen, we two,
like sailors ever-docked, close enough to smell salt
but not near enough to taste it; that is what it is like
sometimes–to love you–a picture of salt and sea,
ice and smoke, pucker and blow, lips and madness,
like the drilling seagulls nodding at shadows below.
You are safety and warning, primrose and punches
encircled in the harbored haven of wide pillow tides.
And I want to do you justice like you do me favors,
gallop my heart in nursery rhymes and terrifying arches
quaking knees and stammering sonnets of hiccuping
trees branches pulled and bent near to snapping, give
over me like you do sometimes with that leering grin
aiming to frighten me with desire, leaning in and on
as the sculpted figures of en-marbled lunging Lamia.
credit: img12.deviantart.net
In the gaze of the other 