Kissing her Fingers

It helps that she’s asking and not telling.
It helps that I know her and she knows me and we have known each other intimately.
The fact that we are sitting, almost alone, at five o clock in the morning, also helps.
Movements of a homeless person orbit us,
Hair like matted dung and the hide of a dead elephant,
He asks us for a light and we give him more cigarettes to smoke.
Four whiskeys and some beer ferment within me like passion fruit,
And I rock with the weight of a vessel.

We sit in a square lit by shades of darkness.
Cats, like choruses, yelp alone and together,
-EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE-
Parallel to the economy and tightness of our breaths,
I see a shark’s fin circling in my eye’s corner,
Fear of choking begins to loosen my tongue,
It helps that she knows me well enough not to lecture.
Her silences are a song.

My manhood is being pulled from its scaffold now,
Rolled tightly into a ball of upset child,
She asks after I answer,
And warmth begins to grow back,
Like hair after an illness,
Like a serpent’s second tail,
Her face has a roundness that feels celestial.
She is my friend. And I answer to her silence.

Kissing her Fingers

We sit on the edge of a disused water fountain now,
Its pipes are switched off and its base is full of fallen leaves,
I listen to her voice and we stare at surfaces rusting,
The phlegm in my chest begins to petrify,
She observes my head’s statue while sitting cross-legged,
My head is a horse bowing, with eyes raised towards a canvas obscured by trees…
The halo she thinks I’ve earned is a circle drawn with charcoal,
She doesn’t know that her words are sparks in a painted breeze

Dialogue becomes soliloquy,
I stutter because I’ve never been beautiful,
Pan stops smoking and clicks his tongue next to my ear,
The echo of hooves and a bone breaks through the skin’s surface,
She’s startled but stays, her jeans are creaking.
It matters that she’s stayed on when the others have all left.
It matters that we go and buy a beer from a kiosk that’s still open.
It matters that she pretends we are sharing it.

Kissing her Fingers

I stand behind the ink of my own body now,
Looking at the road, looking at my shoes hanging over the road and feeling my weight beneath the sky.
Telling myself that I understand the difference between warrior and soldier,
Telling myself this as I begin to smell my own scent under a cave of nostril,
Telling myself that the permanence of tattooing isn’t the weakest symbol,
Telling myself this while cats sleep clueless beneath parked cars.

The Sun’s birdcages are kept closed but white noise builds
Regardless,
Pan coughs something up and exits the scene like smoke.
I peel off this scab and in she slides.