Two Suns

When you're talking to someone-- an acquaintance, maybe just a stranger--

when you're pretending like it's not too much,

like you can't feel each muscle of your face assuming position,

throwing a net around your social responsibilities, holding them in place,

and preparing you for the script of white lies.

When the someone mentions a drink you two should have, a movie you should see,

Or a stranded day at the beach,

And all you can do is think of this plan in a certain twisted sadness because you know,

even at the start you know,

you will never care enough to follow through.

And yet here is so-and-so detailing a restaurant or a scene,

a thing you will never be a part of.

And suddenly you have this sense of two lives at once

the happening one and the not-gonna-happen

both of them spanning out simultaneously

both of them vividly alive and present

with colors and houses and little bent plants.

Sometimes it is all you can do just to separate these worlds

to know that they are different, to wonder if they should be.

He and you, you lived in both.

For a second there, you marinated in both.

The grasses and the sands still stick to the crevices of your body,

still catch within your ears and pour out onto your fingers.

There were two suns melting and dripping on your towels.

Two tables, two waiters, two salted rounds of drinks.

Two subtle tugs of gravity, magnets for your bones,

and time wanes as it all starts to tear you in half.

And of course it would not last-- these things, they never last--

But for a second there, you almost thought you were able

To live in the place where everything is real and everything exists

and to visit, from time to time,

the place where nothing hurts and everyone always shows up..

Fossils

You keep kissing me and you keep not knowing that

You’re interchangeable. A Friday night. A light streak of bubbles and chapstick residue, crawling across my face.

We sprawl on the wrinkled face of sheets, the tired eyes of the striped black pillows blinking shut beneath our locked heads. A world turned sideways. A different plane altogether.

And here I am in the physical boldness of the font, the screaming act of action.

Here I am feeling myself apart from myself. Again. Criticizing myself. Again. Sitting up and above myself, the hesitant judge at the singer’s audition as her throat quivers and her fingers curl in landslides of sweat. As the thing, the only thing, she has stirred in the corners of her organs, the scales of voice and muscle, as it all pours out before her the wrong way.

By returning it, by the subtle pursing of my lips towards yours, I am trying to prove something of the weight of it all. I am trying to convince you to be unconvinced, to show you the secret before you’ve noticed the mystery.

But maybe if I spread it out, donate the sections of my head, maybe I could crush us all. So I shutthefuckup and I suck on your neck.

You keep smashing your canvas of skin into me and you keep not knowing that

we’re only fossils.

We’re only hollowed imitations of something alive. Intricate rivets of rock and bone and place and time. Wanting the wanting that has long left our bodies.

We are only fossils.

A presence derived from an unmitigated absence.