1.
You, like tinsel hung from the crescent moon, are too shining to be true

Your eyes with their ancient sadness

Your lips that make shapes when you laugh

Your face and the perfect faces you wear

Your mind with its cities and ports

Your brick-worn hands that pull at my thin skin when we touch, which we don’t, anymore


2.
I am a long run down the seamed stocking of a pin-up girl

And you, you, you are the man for whom that girl wears those stockings


I am the high-heeled shoes she wears
You are the height she is trying to reach

I am the tangle of hair that brushes her white throat, which pulses for your lips,
you are the reason for her faster beat



3.
In addition to scintillating, you are hard
Hard like obsidian and titanium

Hard like learning to speak Tuyuca

Hard like the ground beneath my feet on a day in early spring when the certainty of the sky above rests heavy on the world

Hard like grain alcohol

And I am soft, soft like the gum squeezed into the crevices of asphalt until it is no longer visible

4.
And she, the girl I can never actually be, walks with her long legs and her high heels and her flowing hair and her short skirt and her red lips and her stockings with the seams, across you to you, and grinds me further into, until I am lost

She is a dream

You are the dreamer

I am the flaws that wake you up