Graffiti on Overpasses

It is the bloom of high pink in your cheeks.  It is the salt that brims on your forehead, the mercurial color that warms in the heat like a litmus, the sun blazing upon you and releasing the tannins and rising against your skin in pastels.

There are words to describe, words to define.  Words that carry a weight unnoticed until the slight moment when you might remember them and they thud down the stairs of your mind.  Words, like graffiti on overpasses, that you quick-glance upon and move on.  Yet they tattoo.

I try, with the paint brush tip licked upon my lips, to color in the commentary.  I try to do the portrait.  I try to do the scene.  I try to kaleidoscope the stark beauties of you into a sentence.  I try to fixate on a part that can reveal, a part that can sheen.  A cheek, a slight portion of you.  An eye.  Unblinking.  A piece that maybe you concern with what I find haunting.  And find an unmasked color.  A crayon yet unnamed.  Somewhere lost in the box.  The casual glance of a passers-by going beneath a bridge, where graffiti litters the overpass.

The pinprick of a stylus.  Words inscribed and word released, exposed.  The trouble with words is that the prisoners have escaped the tight prison from which they were born.  There are no pardons, no bail.  Once written they bloom like weed-petals and depend on air to care and to feed.  And they usually loiter and linger and crumple like burnt paper and collapse.  Ashes from a bridge destroyed, burnt and broiling in the destruction of graffiti in overpasses.

Try to whitewash it.  Try to color it gray or white.  Try to paint over the simple pierce of skin and the deep wound it causes and rarely recovers.  Try to remove the sweet stain of you against a skin that is burnt and scarred from you.  And in the closing moments...when your mind stirs itself asleep, when it careens with the avalanche of the day, and you spend a few seconds in a place that you had not noticed...the graffiti on the overpass blooms in your mind, coloring your evening, cascading against the blacks and whites and finds your eyes closing in a collapse of colors that you might not have noticed.  The strokes of a scene that I embedded into you.

Solstice

I used to gauge how deep I was into the summer by the length of the blacktop I could walk in my bare feet.

And dove into a pool that had barely crested 54-degrees because it was officially opened and I wanted to be the first one in…my pale 10-year old body a mass of shivering ribs and lips the color of the deep-end.

My favorite candy was the candy necklace, and I would eat some bit-parts of it and wear the rest around my neck, the sticky candy leaving tiny smears of sugar and color across my collarbone.

We’d store quarters in our tennis shoes, waiting for Adult Swim, waiting for the clanging of the Good Humor man…he had it good and easy…one stop in front of the pool and he made his killing…push-ups were popular but I didn’t like the way they melted along the cardboard.  Nutty Buddy was my favorite ice cream, the ultimate combination in crunch and chocolate.   My friends and I, tucked on the lawn in front of the pool because we couldn’t bring in food…glancing nervously at the high dive and waiting to go back and fling ourselves off into the bright hot space of summer.

Summer became a convertible, and a row-boat on a lake.  Summer is mentioned in days, not hours as the heat and humidity crawl and cover you in its gauze.  First kisses that tasted like popsicles, sugary and tart and you forgot about the weather.  Your throat tightening as girls in bathing suits pulled off tee-shirts and slid off shorts and walked into waves.  Tanned skin flashing in angles and the dripping of hair as they came close to me, barely sensing the scent of the ocean upon them.  Towels laid over hot black leather seats and the chill of wind on the drive home with the top down.

Summer was the music on a boom box, the music of cicadas, the night-stir of insects.  Blue shades of sprinklers setting off at dusk.  The sky was the color of a creamsicle in the late afternoon.  The hint of sunburn felt like a stolen kiss, unaware, leaving a heat that lingered. 

 

One summer we went to Baja California, where I saw an octopus roll one arm out in a wave and watched my sister scream and never go near the water the entire trip.

Another we drove across America, and saw the Painted Desert National Park at sunset.  The Hoover Dam.  But mostly we were in the car, and we were very hot.

One summer I spent in Airborne School, head-shaved and stuck in a barracks in Georgia.  19 years old and being thrilled to death.  Silver wings and a hope that I never would have to do that again.

One summer I learned on a star-lit night that half the stars we see are dead.  And only now are we able to see their light.  I remember my friend explaining that to me and I was completely speechless.  I remember somebody had set a fire on the beach, and I wondered if anybody in space could see it.

One summer I was lighting fireworks on the beach, big rocket types.  Probably illegal.  And we were drinking, just two kids drinking Lowenbrau because we thought we were refined.  And I lit the biggest rocket we had, maybe two feet high, and I started running…only to look behind and see my friend watching from the launch pad.  And my horror when the rocket went up 50 feet and came straight back down, hitting my friend on the ankle.  He limped home, bitter and mad.

One summer my two best friends in high school were arrested for breaking and entering houses in our neighborhood to steal items to sell for drugs.  And I was away at camp.  And how bittersweet it was because they asked the police to go to my house and assure my parents that I had never done anything, that I had never entered or helped.  And I remember those moments when I knew they were inside a house, and I would go walking. Away, just nonchalantly.  Just not being there.  But knowing what was going on.

One summer at this camp I asked a girl in high school to go out to visit the graveyard, which was the scene for finding a place to make out.  And she said no, and I was sad but I figured I’d find somebody else.  And that night, my friend and I saw her out with another guy.   Heading to the graveyard.  She tried to hide her face, but I knew it was her.

One summer I fell in love.  And in another summer I fell in love again. 

One summer was the perfectly round sun, in a cloudless sky, as we drove away from our wedding, hanging just barely on the ledge of the West.  We were in a classic 1930’s limousine, complete with an old man in a driver’s uniform. 

 

I cannot wait to see what this summer brings.

Night breaks, Night cuts, Night falls

The blackness is the color of your eyes, an almost-evening sky that lies in wait as the day hurries behind trees and hills, pulling golds and oranges behind it.  Hues of blues, hints of bruises as the night thuds against my head, it's crushing like a black pill powdered by a pestle.  Sprinkle the evening amongst my eyes, blurring and blackening, let me see stars as the weight hits me.  Night breaks.  Night cuts.  Night falls.

Alone in an evening, surrounded by the mistakes of the day.  Consumed by the last, unpushed domino.  Awake in anticipation that hurrying to sleep might bring me perhaps to the nearest point that I could be to you.  With you.  Whatever.  Doesn't matter.  Blackness is measured in depth, not distance...there may be no other side, or it might be right there close.  Doesn't really matter.  Night breaks.  Night cuts.  Night falls.

Cooling, breathing, quiet night air noises that steal in and pretend to stroke and whisper me to sleep.  They remind me of a word unspoken, just slight vapors that remain unrevealed, waiting to be released.  They flow across me in wordless flight, reminding me of an almost-touch, almost-glance, an almost-reveal.  They thud heavily across the expanse of the bed.  Night breaks.  Night cuts.  Night falls.

A hot red blood pulses behind my clenched-closed eyes, a sheet gripped in a frustrated grasp of a hand, a sheen of slight sweat pearls against my skin.  Unseen in the dark, I count the tiring sweep of hands across a clock face, begging for the night to under-tow me in.  I wait for the footfalls of an evening to reach my door, my window.  I wait for night, like a knife, to prey upon me.  I wait for the crumble of an evening to block out all the stars and suffocate me to sleep.  Night breaks.  Night cuts.  Night falls.