samphraser

On walls of this house, our lives are charted. We are Venn diagrams of humans. There are days that I am bar graphs and you are musical notation. But on every day the music moves me, and when the sunshine has it's confidence it gives me   my strangely hanging smile. The pointed pins on a map mark our pains like capitals. There is no monument to cities left very far behind.

A dark oil current tried to drown me, but in every ebb I rose. In murky water, I faced a death each morning. In an underwater cave, my only light in rocky ugly dreams. We would be ships, forever lurking on the bottom, only hulls and algae. With our churning arms and flailing elbows, we spent our year muddying the waters. It was broken bones and desperation. The breaching of the surface Was a softly spoken, human story. It was told by tired muscles And spun with stained and sticky fingers. We nearly drowned but the story goes, “We swam!”

She spoke to me, a string of tarnished pearls, a conversation held like clouds spinning onward, twisting my intentions. If there was sand within me, it was swiftly giving way. Unfit to hold the ocean at my door, she was shaking me and riding on my swells I collapse and fall deep within, two hundred miles beneath these surging waters. I am lost. My body rises again, like breath and spent exertion, condensing on her skin. The wind shall gather. She leans in and gives the word. These violent, warning, purple clouds become a sudden storm and it only took a whisper