abstruse

I had bangs.

Softly emblazon your name down my spine.

It’s your fingertips that raise ships

While mine bend and whine.

Pen to paper, you write scripts,

 Your lips pursed beneath stubble.

Now I cuss at bell chimes,

Stolen sheets causing trouble.

We’ve agreed I’ve had worse crimes–

 Spilt wine, cigarette burns

Lipstick stained glasses, late for classes

Forgetting to make turns,

My sway distracts masses.

While I struggle to keep time,

I wake up to last night’s mistakes stamped across my hand,

head pounding, my eyes flutter helplessly against light

sneaking, creeping through curtains torn

from the time she tried wine without the glass

spilled lines, tasted freedom, wasted time;

all while white smoke billowed from her lips.

 I can still hear her now, anxiously pursing her lips,

“We have to leave soon,” choking neck with hand.

But she can’t find her phone to check the time,

reaching angrily to borrow my light.

I’ll primp and pose, reflecting in glass

only to surrender to scrutiny of tights, torn

 but not wasted, like the pages she had torn

from their places, stealing stories from my lips.

She skips class to kiss glass,

rolling papers in hand,

begging strangers for a light,

swearing by the words, “next time.”

 I’ll tap my toes, keeping us in time

While she bleeds into speakers, “I’m torn.”

I can’t make out faces beyond blinding light,

between licks, chapping lips,

gripping in hand

bent strings; I’ll etch progressions in glass

 while she looks on, glass–

y eyed like the last time.

Instead of lending a helping hand

I’ll point and I’ll prod until she is torn

From this town, leaving nothing but lips-

tick stained cigarettes at the setting of light

 hearted jokes taken anything but light–

ly, she breaks glass after glass after glass

in spite of me. Curses flood from cold lips

while I repeat, “There won’t be a ‘next time.’”

Bludgeoned promises beneath ideas of shirts torn

by a boy who never even offered to hold her hand.

 As my head aches, my words shake, I shed tears with time,

Finding memories between paper clippings, pictures torn

Your lips, linger fluidly across glass like thickening water, kissing the rim ever so gently yet yielding such a reminder it posses the ability to overflow at any false step. So subtle you are. Your cheeks bruised from grinning that toothy smile; subtle enough to be overlooked yet emblazon with the strength to make the powerful weep.

‘Where did you come from?’ I whisper beneath disheveled sheets, my sore eyes wander between your collarbones. Your answer is weak ­– weaker than the knees that struggle to find their way toward yours: motioning me from this wishful sleep. It’s the quiet clink of your bottle to my bedside table that bleeds across a moonlit floor. The birds sing slumbering rhythms to one another across the ease of a mourning sky wishing only to turn back to night.

He clears his throat. I choke back mine. Outstretched arms find furlough across your chest as it rises. It falls. So slightly, my eyelids lift in beat. My sheets, how they whisper across untamed skin. It’s the roughness of your forearm they never intended to encounter. Rise against the light yet to rise above itself. We fall further into the luxury that is a churning flame, yet to be dimmed by time and place.

“Coffee?” Your voice – needles down my spine. I moan lightly into a pillow who has heard it all before. You accept, lifting yourself cautiously as not to awake the sleeping animal nestled so quietly between empty bottles and torn sheets from a book I promised I’d never read.