San Francisco’s marine layers can meet universal sensations in the most happenstance, poetic moments.
The drink sweats as you hum on about three weeks spent in France;
Paris, to be exact — a city bathed in passion and fondness
San Francisco starts to vanish beneath the fog
I notice looking out that window off Castro Street
My eyes return to your dimples, cavernous;
I want to see myself getting lost in them
how my face would fold into yours;
the way butterfly wings meet one another
come warm summer days atop bluebonnet fields
All I can think about is how the one before you met me in a chrysalis —
spinning each other into madness, clung together by conversations
that left my thumbs aching;
my lips wet with one too many gin and sodas;
my neck stretched by two pairs of brown eyes underneath city lights
I sank through him like a stone
My ankles anchored to the thought of stumbling
back into the concavity of his smile lines
For a moment in time, I could feel my lungs collapse;
I saw myself drowning in the narrow sea between his body and mine
before leaving in the morning —
to swim back toward my senses
I worry I take your patience for granted;
like he did mine
Your gentle touch, your queries about my mom;
the kindness he swiped from me
How your words land softly in areas of black and white;
I’ve been too hung up on the contrarian panchromatic films
Playing back in my mind
How coloring in between the lines
of his composite cues
cracked my mind and
broke my body
He’ll be on Grindr after the bars close
drunk and high
lying and classified
staring at thumbnails with celestial eyes
playing a man three years younger
misleading with captured moments of a past life
“I don’t mind,” I told him in the glow of dive bars
as my bioluminescence began vanishing;
growing quiet in bed
then angry at my friends
before the flaming rage and rusted knives
pierced his cotton candy spine
You’re radiant, you shine in summer Pantones
I feel your field of dreams matches the candle’s warmth
When my mind goes to the arsons
those before set
walking on beaches,
gathering empty seashells and hollow dreams;
matches lit by shifting that old Mini Cooper on U.S. 75;
when one poured gasoline on my feet
somewhere in Golden Gate Park
before driving to the airport in deafening silence
A story about your dog gobbling half a birthday cake
You catch my smile — a break from gnawing at my tongue
killing time right in the nick of time
before the ink bleeds;
fables and phantoms etched in square napkins
We kiss as fog swallows the city each of us swears never to leave
but this sensation feels momentary;
Your valiant roar with a hand over my dry mouth;
my fingers still inside of him
— I think it just takes time, not simply a get-rich-quick scheme
When it felt like someone wanted you dead
running themselves off a road with you in the passenger seat
I bite my tongue as a fog blankets San Francisco, and
for a moment in time, I tell myself all this will be just fine and fucking good riddance —
“I’m the love of my life.”
