you are a parachute that never opened

without anyone-elses, winter and spring are just two different kinds of gray. one slithers like it's made of scales and silk and the other slips through your fingers like sand, shellacs like sea glass. baby, i've had empty mailboxes and inboxes and bedspace for weeks but my belly's too full of words to care. we all have cocoons made of cracked egg shells, anyway; we are barely living/still fluttering butterflies in glass cases.

now i collect post-sex poeticisms: intentional movements of trees in snow storms, parachutes that never opened. we can laugh until they feel like the tiny silver glints in pavement that are those good moments in Life, but i sleep less and hold my breath longer underwater because of them. and all i learned this summer was how to build bridges, fix transmissions, ride without my hands on the handlebars. one winter i'll settle down in the middle of everywhere, with more no-ones than someones as long as the no-ones don't have teeth as sharp as yours, hands as familiar to so many as yours, witticisms as naked as yours. (sometimes i know from the very backs of my knees that there is no more space left in my body for nothing but the flat spot on the back of my head where i hit the tile falling from my father's arms as a baby with a thick mop of black matted hair implies otherwise,) so this gray may i resolve to be better: eat better, sleep better, speak better, love better, love less--

you felt full of reasons. now i think i made them up: digging between the spokes of the wheels on my bicycle and your tired, squinting expressions in dull light in dive bars. but i don't sink so deeply into bathtubs and mattresses now, now that i have my own raisons d'être: listening to the rain and the radio, egg yolks that shine like opals, winning ends of wishbones, mottled sunlight, people called charlie, a slanted c'est quoi? carved on the tree in the yard the june i turned twelve, your cheeks (pink as peonies).