The Patron Saint of Crying in Public

All eye crinkles and being awoken from a dead sleep by you pressing warm pain au chocolat in your palms. How we squeezed a balloon between ours until it burst and it was like the big bang ("we’re disturbed enough already"/spectators shouldn’t suffocate with scrutiny)

How your wheel got stolen so red wine back to mine (Lukewarm, how you could perform an unsupervised autopsy of cryptic, outgrown innards whereas all I could do was glue a broken saucer together try and decipher or exhume my future fortune from patterns in strewn tea)

Hempstead Harbor, a recording of you reading Finnegan’s Wake. I confused it with ‘poor old Michael Finnegan-begin-again’ and Fingal’s cave. (Why the hell didn’t I take any photographs? We were on a boat from the bird sanctuary and we had shortbread and the captain played the Felix Mendlessohn Overture and the ocean got quite choppy and it was probably the best moment of my life so far)

That time I bumped into you and you had a black eye and leaned me under the Willow Oak. That time I bumped into you outside the Frick and you were typewriting stories for stranger’s donations. And it’s funny how at Easter I said; “Hey, no pressure (my hero Giles Corey; More Weight, More Weight) but yeah you make me wanna wear colors”

(Owning twenty-one black dresses and feeling like an ugly duckling in each of them)

Then on your last night of being twenty-four how you saw me looking at the lone couple dancing and grabbed me out of the blue to drag me out in front of everyone then drove us home clinging on for life that suddenly did feel quite dear. Then on the chair and again after eating hazelnut butter we nearly demolished the kitchen and in the morning three men with chainsaws were cutting down your sycamore and the sawdust came through the window onto our naked bodies like snow. You ate eggs and sage from a pan and I had green grapes and you said you could store shower water in the hollows of your clavicles and how you left your laptop in a crate of cherry tomatoes.

And ‘Hey sorry I’ve been in prison. x’ and forgetting to mention you were off to Austria. When Chris unsympathetically wiped away my tears with his thumbs and said “It’s just like glitter, it’s just like glitter”

And if you remain just a stranger I will remember your pale back with freckles (not to have not to hold) I will remember how it only took me six weeks to wash you off my wall.

Phoenix, igneous, haven’t you learnt your lesson? Thou shalt not seek validation.

Thou shalt not seek validation from any creature on the face of this earth.

I have always been obstinate:

“Careful, you’ll crack your head open,”

I cracked my head open. They had to get extra nurses to hold me down.

The river never taught me to swim, I just had to learn once I’d jumped in.

She’s a marooned sea urchin with opinions that come down like iron curtains.

She will eat your grief like Urdu’s gham-khor She will bellow your sentences like Flaubert’s gueuloir I’m a marooned sea urchin with opinions that come down like iron curtains.

I will eat your grief like Urdu’s gham-khor I will bellow your sentences like Flaubert’s gueuloir Spit blood till the sonic core.

Give me the strength of a seed pushing up through wet earth. Break me like every dawn.

Let’s sit on opposite sides of a soccer field and try and envisage a new color. Let’s sit in a dark room and see if polo mints really light up when you snap them in half.

I may not have acupunctured the map (I would like to have spent my summer doing something other than being a copy writing Cinderella but my coping mechanisms require militarily planning and precision) and there may have been times I was so lonely I had a fantasy that you were THE ONE, but I have a bruise above my navel from Prosecco corks and I swam in the marsh and a swan came along and I tried not to think about that myth with Zeus and then someone yelled that there were pike in there but what did I care? What did I care?

And I may have got Petechia from retching and sobbing but now you’re a car alarm at 3 AM.

You’re light pollution cloaking constellations. I didn’t want to stick a flag in you.

I remember phone calls when I was in Boston. I remember you dressed as a plague doctor. I remember you pulling my hair. I remember iSpy bicycle books. And furtive looks. Boring into me like a worm, I burn. My fingertips on light bulbs. I am impatient. But I would have waited (the lifespan of several insects.) I would have learned you slowly, read you like something I didn't want to finish. I just wanted an inch.

No encore for atrophy (upside down inspecting my toes in a dark alley) but rope swings and the ripeness of things. Blessings in disguise; your mind is the horizon and these thoughts are just racing clouds.

And I guess I’ll forget the lipstick marks I left on your Danish pastry, eventually.