Love and Thunderstorms

I am running from you, you know. I have been running from you
Since the day you delivered me, tiny and still dreaming, from the underwater womb
to the fever of infatuation.
And I was running when I saw the blue seep from the sky as
You unplugged the drain of your onyx bath tub and put away
your broken boats.

I saw the way you turned the stratosphere's bright face a sickly gray,
just as you would adjust a radio knob to drown me out.
(Humane beauty doesn't suit your tastes, I suppose)
She looked as if she wished to vomit thick, sweet sickness and
thunder and rolling apocalypses. You made her want to die almost as much as
you made me want to live.

And I know that I am a speck on this winding dirty swirl of a path-
and no matter how I push my bulging lungs to burst, I smell your smoke-
the smoke of Salem, seeking a noose to stop my breath until
my vision of the world tunnels to only wet eyes-fear's primal pupil pools-
that consume and assume my impending doom
so soon-
even when I tear myself apart and fling the gasping pieces to the red sea so that
not even God can make them resurface.

You are in my blood and I can see you on the moon-
laughing, jeering, whistling out of tune. You are
veering off course for the pure and unbridled purpose
of knocking me off my feet to send me careening, screaming out out out
of orbit.

Now I am lightless, sightless, mapless, trapped,
A faint but unrelenting pulse, a
wild-haired and reeling mess rid of pilot and harness.
Me, a personless plane, jagged, lagging, bow-legged horse, a desert plain-
an abandoned planet's weak heartbeat, a withering flower beneath dark and mirthless earth.

I sense your lips waiting to be tempted, to be tasted, to be trusted,
singing sonorous sound waves out of the weathered, silent sun to arouse
goose flesh on the surface of me.
The stars are here to witness these my tears and the way your long fingers
unravel skin threads, shift the magnets of my spine, re-align, scrape the rinds of my mind to feast upon the soft and tortured insides.

(I'll let you destroy me so long as there are angels and demons to balance
the petals of my he-loves-me-nots, as long as there is
a God to damn you.
I.
will.
let.
you.
break.
me.
so long as you hold me together after, so long as you mend me as you did
your spider-cracked shelves of a little boy's toy boats.)

I long for you to someday wash and polish me,
to take the sweat and filth and hurt and dirt away,
to make me pretty as the dead poets say.

But I am not one to pray, and
you are not one for somedays.