You’re just like rain on a hot day
The air so heavy
Beading on my skin
I need to drink you in.

I lived in the garden of still life
Waiting for your induction
Since the seduction of Claudius
Counting the lily blooms
Through every summer
Counting and counting
As if to drown in that shallow pond
The notion that I’d ever recover
From your golden touch.

when are they going to tell me
I’m unwise
I never knew I was morally righteous
in his eyes
Perhaps my time in campaign
Has all been the same
For the sake of the sacred,
A misguided gang
When I’m led like a child
By your stare
Like a lamb
If I take a step further
it will change who I am
your error in confidence
but your stellar gaze
Compels my days

I don’t know if I’m ready
I don’t know if it’s fair
I don’t know if I’m ready
I don’t know if it’s fair

I’m a seeming romantic
My thoughts in a straight line
Your hair in a straight line
Our hearts in a straight line
Two points connected by an infinite motion
Two points in the abstract void of space and time
Two points at times defined by x and y
Can you feel the connection?
Or do you need one
My water-bringing days
Deep under your dirt
Beckons new drink
Fills your roots

I’m scared of the stipulations of this adventure
Scared when you tell them it’ll all be over
Vitriolic voices vying for attention
Sweet-toothed lobbyists looking for love
When you find a real love, will you still have me?
Can we contain love in secrecy

The nomad on his feet, with his cherub throne
Acutely conscious of being alone
A tiger on the plain
Can do not a thing
Sworn to be strange
But striped the same

Sweet sleek drawl
Coax me forward
You’re hang-gliding into my
Stoic heart
Your house,
like your heart,
in shambles.
You once kissed me
Held me too tightly
In another world.

And of the bitterest friends
Who as far as I can tell
See all things as as a set of specifications
Which cannot inherently change,
One straw man fears the crow,
does not trust her throaty call
or an eye he cannot understand.

Given magic I could conjure
A more satisfyingly clear memory
Of valence electrons
Briefly connecting
Your body
And mine.

It’s called waiting.
It’s called waiting, it’s called writing
Long soliloquies with no place to go
But to open ears in their muslin clothes
And cast within your curtain-hair
Which, tangled, drips from your chin
There must be an answer
At least.

One year ago I watched in horror as hand collapsed into hand,
By the line above the sea where I pined and opined,
But no sapling like that had ever grown.
I should have known
Your defenses were impenetrable.
It’s called waiting,
driven by one word into madness
and consecration
of my imaginary soul.
I tried in vain to force my hand,
which precipitated the fall.