I remember the taste of summer on my shoulders,
the sipping of that slow burn sunset
like the bruising candle and the day we met.
I would sip the air misted with misconstrued intent,
with long forgotten contentment.
The sky gasps once more,
an echo, a slammed door
a gasp that falls,
shatters to the floor,
falls like the sack at your sunburned shoulders.
The world slumping to silence,
ears burning with dread,
sluiced with wildfire anticipation.
Earth pulls into its lungs distorted words,
“Buzzcuts brimming,
line collisions beginning.”
So what matters now are burning tongues,
rusted joints and iced lungs,
moon-crested eyes and smiles gifted,
blood in glass bones lifted,
tree sway moans and honied tones.
We stumble home with scraped knees,
smiles raw and drunk on laughter,
with half empty coca-cola bottles at 2 a.m.
in a kitchen glowing dim we fix the universe–
we fix the universe but not ourselves.
Like the fences we climb,
the trippings we take to strips of cement
where our hands scrape chalked memories of smiles
we wear as painkillers now to mask the miles
between our truths and our lies.
In those rusted shopping carts we’d ride in
in parking lots as empty as the bottles we’d drink from,
under a lilac bruised sky,
those drops dribble like thoughts on my tongue
like voices and basketballs as puddles on a dusk-shadowed street.
This isn’t the song where we use a rainbow as stairs
and sip on waterfalls through curly straws,
this isn’t where I give my heart to you,
this isn’t the suburbia you see in the magazines,
it’s a shadowed one.
A pain of masking into adulthood.
Shedding our skins of youth
leaving them behind
as rusted carts, empty bottles, and polaroids of skies…
burning lungs, aching ribs, smoking tongues
of honey of oncoming days dripping in our eyes.
{ our youth is but just a skin. }
