i open my eyes to your tired grin and you mumble good morning beautiful in that deep, sleepy rasp of yours.
i grab your shoulder to roll myself closer and huff a laugh into your shirt. 

i'm not beautiful right now.
because i know how i look; eyes smudged with last night's mascara and hair wild as a jungle.

but you tangle a hand in my jungle hair and gently remove the elbow i've jabbed into your ribs and...

today is a rainy day; i smell petrichor lifting from
the ground.

sounds are muted; i can't hear the highway beyond
the pecan orchard.

leaves are turning; i trace the edge of a golden
sycamore leaf.

my lips are cold; i wish for nothing more than yours
to warm them up.
 

all the walls have tumbled. there 
is nothing left but crumbling stone 
and sun-bleached lichen, also white-hot 
sunlight which burns away any plant to
dare put down roots between rent ribs 
and fractured femurs. once lush and
flourishing, now lifeless lies this heart.
ask yourself, really ask yourself; who
is worth such trouble? because, you
know, Someone Somewhere is.
 

you are more to me
than a two-step dance
and a hand to cling to.

you are more to me
than a desperate good-bye
and lovesick love letters.

centuries, i have waited for
your iridescence, dearest.
 

you are the embodiment of courage, love.

& it hurts my heart to think there was ever 
a time you believed you were anything less.
 

and when the people sing their songs of
rotting shipwrecks and skeleton sailors,
my lips stretch in a savage smile;

they know little of the ocean's love for dead things,
the ocean's thirst for destruction and anger and rot.

and when the people sing their songs of
lusty-eyed sirens and hideous sea-serpents,
uncouth laughter thunders in my lungs;

what else could have sprung from millennia of misery?
what else, besides wave after pounding wave of salted rage?