I have been smiling and sniffing my forearm ever since you left.
It still smells like your perfume. I guess it rubbed off
at the gate, when my arms were wrapped around your shoulders.

I have never smiled so long on account of smelling my own arm.

Many hungry months I have hidden behind the drawn curtains,
waiting for soft and careful footsteps to find me out.
You startled me when you pulled back the drapes so swiftly.

But even so, better that you found me than some pride of stray calicos.

Look, what I am trying to tell you each time I wobble my tongue
is that your wide, blue eyes are two brimming buckets
and I will try my damnedest to not spill a drop.

And a tree falls on your head

The ram in the desert runs from the lioness,
prays with all four legs for his neck and breath,
galloping and sucking the hot dust.
The ram rips the air with his curled horns,
snorting, chomping and clacking his teeth.
The lioness, sleek golden death with fangs
and paws the size of the ram's haunches, and claws!
The ram is no match and deep in his muscles he knows it.
Death is coming faster than he can run, and faster
every second. Who lives? Who eats? Time is the decider,
time and a twist of the ankle and a speck of dust in the eye.

And in our barren streets we scurry,
praying to calm our worries about elevators,
tap-dancing on the pavement for a quarter.
What is this air that we suck, this carbon air,
this plague of sand and locusts?
In our cars and on park benches we sit and moan,
"Black out our eyes," we cry and our throats mean it.
"Stop staring at the clock," we say to ourselves
in our secret hearts, "Time will never pass."
But the clock ticks and it clicks out our fortunes
sure as sunrise, the second hand and a broken hip and a tree falls on your head.

A Cloud Evaporating Inside the Sea

Her hair is always piled on her head in wild tangles
like the crow’s nest of a schooner out on the windy high seas
while waves crash and slap the sides of the ship.
And just like the windy high seas, I breathe her,
timeless and salty, into the bottom of my broadened chest.
When I am inside of her I disappear, a sack of salt spilt
in the warmth of the water all around, a cloud evaporating inside the sea.