Tandem Miracle

On this blueprint your calloused hand
squeeze before me, the warrant luscious,
bursting along seams and stained, wavering edges,
I choose to pursue,
the grid will mark my trail to you and you,
you trace your finger through pink slime,
– our future you promise –
no need for words, just feelings:
not only you and I alone, a tandem miracle will travel,
the promised road I imagine absorbed by
your skin, thin and leathery
as if water and sun hit it constantly.
Along its promise, on the 3D map,
blinded I follow, pattern routing the complexities
of my life,
I go.

Your fingers drum here, and there
leaving fingerprints on the map
marking stop-overs,
we're a miracle together, you solitary singles,
You promise. Take my hand, your eyes say.
There are ridges, the way the map was folded
as you kept it in your breast pocket,
they birthed gorges.
There are highlands,
for good measure, following suit,
and streams,

Tandem Miracle

I wonder if you wept as I looked away,
unsure,
riverbeds too, crooked, aged,
Of an old map,
laden with nostalgia. Whose?

Here, the vintage print illustrates
the secluded path
where I’ll meet a girl
with the sweetest face,
then the shadowed street
where we’ll share a home
and many laughs,
an enchanted life,
among flowers and everlasting scents.
But what a short stay,
I see now.

The uphill follows next, blood stained,
ensnared,
in a poised landscape,
in a distant land,
forced in a stamped existence.
It was all marked,
I see. Now.

I don’t want to follow
the map laid out for me,
why should I fight battles
I never chose to be in,

Tandem Miracle

spend my body
creating ties
that repose riches
I had no knowledge of?

I stretch out my hands
and cover the map,
erase the mountains
and the deep shafts
and believe they are gone.
Invisible to the eye.

Look at your hands, you say.
I turn them over, and there are
pink mountains, rivers, streets and towns.
closed borders, forced entrances,
The landmarks I covered before
stained lines, on my hands.

No, I say.