a lovely thursday

i'm going to wear your indifference wrapped around my arms

with a ribbon scrolled in a language familiar and cryptic as twins

talking with tongues and elbows

i'll walk on your cool quiet in the pedicured grass, a sign adorning:

"don't you trespass here, your feet will tickle our green watery heads"

and laugh away convention with a rattle

i spend my days painting walls canary and lunar sunset

hula hooping saturn's rings

pulling fate's tablecloth from under stacked wine glass

and lapping pearls from shells with tongue and gum

for the price of your raised eyebrow

and tonight, when i pull the dust of unrequited dancing from between my toes

and set my blessings to pasture, jumping over cedars

i enumerate every stiff brown hair

rice night

your brown eyes

were a fine surprise

tore down skies

for the pine was spry

i'm not

i'm not that in love with you
it's not like the things i do
attempt to accrue
a more beautiful truth
of one one from a two

it's not like i only see
your face in every body
black hairs and sweaters
are poison to me

i suppose if i want
i could read some kant
who conveys other ways
to see beauty

but i'm not so sure
there is a cure
to this feeling i get
like a wave on a shore
and i sure can't regret
what has come here before
when the waters stay wet
i can't help wanting more

can't jive, don't hate

to the musicians i will never have:

my language is the common one. the kind that gets you extra cream in your coffee, or your oil checked. it is the twenty-six letters assembled together that form these modes of expression that i use to make my professors happy, and my temperament said.

your language is the one i admire though. theres a middle man. or woman (instruments have curves). and i know that to play them is to touch your first love. i'm content with the status of mistress, if only to your wooden woman. but like you, i can't get content.

something about thumbs slapping strings to make the soul sing. mine hears it too, and wades through the nonsense of syntax and verb tense like a fog that cuts and clears away. i hear you and it's honest. i hear you. it vibrates my ribs and pulls tight my tendons, aching like a square peg looking down the round tunnel of admiration.

sure, i can jam. but you won't hear me. you'll hear the notes i could shake out of my cold metal valves at the last second. you'll hear the nonsense of noise. you wouldn't know of my soul unless i told you. i need to happen in verbal conversation.

so to my unfortunate unlovers: i love you. polylingual proprietors of my heart, i'm sorry you can't get me. and i'm more sorry than you that soaring free my heart can't be, without a-b-g-d-c. which may or may not be a major key to release a real ease, so i don't wear out what out i sneeze on my sleeve.

love, s-l-c

longing a little longer

purples and yellows will be washed away
by the river of time
but i wish they would stay

so i could see the way your fingers pressed
in my light white thighs
where the colors found rest