2 lovers on a street

Coming home I saw two lovers on the street.

You could tell...you could trust.  There was no gap between them, they fit, they melded.  They molded into each other like a billion puzzle pieces finding a home.

They were not caring about my stare as I walked by...rather their eyes were full of each other, drinking in each other like an addiction that was being unleashed.

They may have been recent lovers...they may have been lovers of old.  But the aura and the tension of them was palpable.  Like a third rail electricity.  Like that copper smell when a transformer is over-heating.

I was in a wind, a cold draft that swept along the street that was filled with strangers...the homeless, the late workers, the dreary and the pale.  People were just blobs moving around me, colors muted and eyes averted.

But they were on a corner, like a bloom.  Like fresh pastels added to a black and white photograph.  They were honey to bees.

I remembered a line from a song that I had sent her..."and I ached for my heart like some tin man".  It was an emptiness, a wringing out of something wrought...a reveal.  Like she had plucked and removed a piece of me that only she could possess.  And when together she would politely place it in its proper place and make me whole...but she had to be there to do it...without her I was incomplete.

I watched these two lovers on the street and knew that they were whole.  I could see it in their bodies as they formed the shape of a question mark against each other.  They wrapped.  Immersed.  Their legs intertwined, in the cool of an evening.  They were probably warm.

They were police-siren reminders and tornado warning sounds to your absence.  The empty fuckingly empty space.

I walked past them, pretended to ignore them, hating them for the very image that I craved and could still faintly remember and could still conjure up but it still felt half-assed.

Simple fact was I needed you beside to restore.  But that wasn't happening for now.

I zipped up my coat and collected it around my throat as the evening had suddenly grown colder.

spray cans

I see the overpass, the white brick buildings...unremarkable, undistinguished.  I see blank spaces and I see voids.

I see a blank dawn, a vanilla sky.  I see a cloud with imperfections...I see a road with blemishes and potholes.  The backs of cars with taillights.

I see front doors, garage doors that I enter time and time again...I recognize the room view, recognize the shapes.  I see the melting of all things that are familiar into a recognizable lump.  I see them colorless, gray and ordinary.

I see the pale people, the strangers and the familiar.  I sense their sameness.  They are all the same.

It's like in my pocket of my coat is a can of spray paint...an iridescent color...provocative.  Evoking.  Something that stands out, catches the eye.

I would love to just press down on the button and release the colors.  What would I write?  Your name?  A script that maybe people could read?

I'd write it wherever I could...the sides of cars, on the sidewalk in front of work.  I might add a decorative heart, or an arrow...hell a smiley face.

I'd think about you coloring my world, my sameness...with your provocative name and your presence.  You provide the graffiti to my day, you write on my white overpasses, you write on my boring garage door.

You don't try to...you just do.

In my mind I would try to share with just a few people your name, and write it in big large letters.
So that I could see it for just awhile.

And have people linger and stare and wonder who that person was...this small bit of art.  This small bit of you.

Flu and Vegas

Las Vegas is supposed to sicken you just a tiny bit.  Maybe it's the over the top opulence, the over-done themes, the gastro-fest restaurants or even the non-stop drinking.  Any of those are likely to cause a sensation that is different than the normal.

But being in Vegas on the outskirts of a flu is just mean.  It robs the body of the resilience needed, it tears down any sort of goodwill offered, it just makes a body raise its hands and basically say:  go ahead, shoot me.

I can only remember a few times when my body felt like this...felt stripped raw like freshly peeled from the inside, the night a bout of coughing and cold sweats mixed with a ravaging fever.  Or a lack of the ability to taste anything good, the mouth soured by a thousand bags of sweet lozenges and enough green tea to cause anything except a cringe.  But a mind just worn flat, quietly tired, shutting down non-critical systems to merely just breath, and focus on fixing...ridding of all distractions so that I don't tempt a nice warm thought to bounce in to just be obliterated by a coughing fit.

But there is that one elixir I still sometimes hold out hope for...an emergence in a room darkened to speed sleep, the air cool to not raise the dryness and cause issues...and that is the ghost form that perhaps you would take if just to come in and merely place a cool hand on a sweaty forehead.

Even just to do that I think would make me feel a billion times better.

Even if I only dreamed it....so far I haven't yet though.

You

Like the steam rising from a glass-encased shower, blurring the warming waters but heating the air inside a winter bathroom.

Like when you've been riding hours in a car to a beach that is just pinking up with sunset and you remove your socks and your shoes and you feel the heat of the street then the grass then the sand and you stop and let the skim of waves come greet you and the water is foam and salty and warm.

Like when you enter into a bakery and luxuriate in the smell of fresh bread.

Like when the bartender slides a frosty glass of beer towards you, your hand cooling as it holds the drink, and you take the first foamy sip of quenching ice cold alcohol.

Like a pile of pillows that just invites you to bed, cool and linen, in an afternoon rain that slides down the windows and provides a white-noise for you to collapse in, succumb to, and rest a weary mind.

Like when you see lightning far away at night.

Like the first fireflies of summer, signaling the warm humid evenings are upon us, with ice melting in our glass as we feel sunburn just starting to form.

Like the delicious slip into soapy warm waters of a tub.

Like when you are driving and traffic is unusually light and your favorite song comes on the air and your windows are down and you turn the volume up as high as it can go.

Like when you see an Ice Cream stand in the heat of an afternoon and you realize you haven't had an ice cream cone in forever but you remember the exact taste of one,  the crunch of the waffle cone and the drip that you licked off of your finger.

Like when you bite the first hot bite of pizza and it's too hot to completely eat and the cheese strings itself between your mouth and the rest of it and it smells like pepperoni and red pepper flakes and you just hold it until it is cool enough to eat.

Like when you kiss somebody eating a life savers, and the candy sweetness mingles with the warmth of pliable lips.

Like when bourbon warms you in a winter.

Like the first star in a purple evening...or maybe a planet...but something to direct your gaze upwards in a sky.

Like in a departure and the clothes still smell like you.

All of these things...daily, seasonally...nightly...they are just sweet and simple reminders.

Of you.