Gravity

Poem inspired by/written for my fellow Toads at Imaginary Garden with Real Toads. Today’s prompt: “Fireblossom Friday: I Feel the Earth Move.”

The hours between midnight and three

I take you out beneath the icy stars

with me where I see

my breath beneath the

bald street light, casting its white

humming hospital-cold

luminescence across the

cracked faces of the sidewalk.

 

I find solace in these places.

Stillness in the rustling silence

of November leaves

curled and dead, scuttling

across the black seas of

grass in shadow.

 

I press play.

“…who’s agonized and gnawed through it all/I’m

underneath your tongue…

I’m standing in the street now/and I carry your guitar…”

 

The strangeness of this one song

I can’t seem to stop playing, the drawn-out

acoustic and monotonous siren of a sax

fill the night around me

or morning,

whatever,

it doesn’t matter anymore

-the time-

I’ve given up on sleep for some time now.

 

I wait for the lyric that shows up–

“…to walk aside your favor, I’m an Astuary King…

I’ll keep it in a cave, your comfort and all”

 

I should be numb.

This is the only place I find you-out in

a deranged landscape that only seems to feel like

the engines of our lonely molecular madness

–how many nights like this

had we spent confessing    —together.

Where one neurological disorder remedied

the other’s.

 

I miss you.

I am not lost by your absence.

I am, if anything, tossed about–my cheeks

flushed, and the only thing I doubt

is not the you and I and we,

because even if only for a while,

I had found my own

apocalypse that ended something so lonely

and breathed a part of myself back into me I never knew

I ‘d been missing–

camaraderie on this solitaire planet,

desires and secrets in the dark

like ghost stories giggled and whispered

at sleepovers.

 

I step onto the smooth pavement.

A gust of cold air blows my hair

out of my eyes, and I face that direction,

my body weightless and alone and so small

in this space;

he stole my gravity

and I don’t want it back.

 

I start walking, probably until just before sunrise.

I don’t know where or when.