2006, Paradise
i flew into the new year hanging onto your shirt.
the room was black with red-orbed edges, it
smelled like laughing people. a boy i just met
wrapped a glowing purple tube around my wrist and i asked
“how long will it last?”
“forever.”
this made me think of us.
and in the stairwell where
last year you cried alone,
we spoke of love and trust,
our words eddies of breath
swirling between the still walls til they
vanished quietly and we
vanished equally into the tinted sea
of happy strangers.
i’ll go home and write an elegy
for this dying year, i thought,
and the snow was thick and clean.
in your driveway we seemed
so small, so still, if the wind were to wake it would have
crumbled us, til we were
the same pile made of different stuff.