skirt

it will be an unfamiliar trial re-learning winter
after a detour to the sea, forcing fatalist hopes and a destiny
to at least see what it could be like, but maybe conquer the earth.
I will turn up ignored collars and string the muscles in my back
like piano wire, the frozen tension enough
to snap me in half, fold me in on myself, were it not for the
strength of a backbone crafted with more. the raw material of hopes and wants
are so similar that it’s hard to say which was used more when
I built this skeleton me.

and with my face to the dark middle wind of the city breath
I love, I will think of naked legs baking like bread in an ancestral
sun, browned and fresh. I want the list for that inside skin,
the last baked with the slightest rise, the soft of which begs to be
brushed with an unshaven cheek, watered and grown.

it seems that in spite of a manifest destiny and the unknowable flares of
fate, this is one plea meant to be ever unknown. you will throw yourself
to seadogs washed to shore where suncooked thoughts
sizzle like the summery roads that stretched us thin and far, and I
will lay with any promise that wants to believe.

so, if my westward mind travels those roads again
while there’s lungfilled whisper in my ear, or a streetside
bakery yields an unnecessary second of pause for a breath, please
don’t blame me for bringing you back from your gut feeling. it is, after
all, home.