cardboard

hands red with the sweet stick
of experience, flowery like pollen
touching bed sheets and buttons
as if to fertilize.

i've started to form an idea of memory
as it influences reality
and the time i spend in showers looking at walls
abstracts of reds, olive green
transparent. transparent. heavy.
unanswerable and completely forgettable.

there are periods when all i can see
is him or her there back then
that once place, remember it was dark?
nameless and cutout of cardboard
smelling of shapes i am wholly incapable of manifesting.

you handed them to me in abundance
incredible forms at which to marvel
and then let die.
i find myself disillusioned
by this unprovoked willingness to taste and let stale.

my father once in line for a bagel
flicks his finger into the soft of a
sticky bun

places the frosting on his tongue
then moves on as if
nothing ever happened.

now i would color my abstracts with browns, purples
your strawberry lips decomposed with
the smack of pavement.
quite literally bleeding into deeper
unexplainable rust.

now i would look with a half eye
at those poses you make
there in the periphery of this
ridiculous tether
and remember what you tasted like

salt and secrecy
midnight moss
like everything was going to be ok
even though nothing was
even though everything eventually will be.

now i pick cherries and
suck on their pits
up in trees
dogs running underneath.

i've more roots than a willow
one hundred years old,
i've leaves brown and turned under from the spring frost
or a deficiency of nitric oxide.