It's too late to call you now, friend.
You're probably just pulling off
the road and checking into
some motel with a vintage
sign glowing neon in East Texas.
The truth is, boy, that
I wouldn't know what to
say if I could get a hold of you
on the phone in my current state
because the last time I saw you,
it was raining in bucketfuls of
liquid pearls and your
mother was waving goodbye on the porch,
as though you were going off to war and
it'd be the last time
she would see your hazelnut eyes
shining and that dopey grin.
Boy, I needed to say a lot of things;
half-truths and metaphors
that I'd swallowed earlier
over a cold breakfast of
orange
Staring up at a cream-colored ceiling,
I lie in bed after you've gone home and think about your bones;
the slender line of your jaw,
the tiny bumps along your spine that I felt once by accident,
and most of all, I imagine what your ribs would taste like
if I could run my tongue along your Arizona flesh.
Boy, this is wrong buta part of me doesn't care
because you're inscrutable, like paper airplane shadows
on day-old snow and my mother's poems, unfinished
as she notices her plants wilting on the porch;
their leaves drooping, spilling
evergreen paint on the rain-spotted earth.
She tells me that you're the smartest kid she's ever met,
and I
Giant trucks speed through my turquoise dreams,
taking fathers away from their disappointed sons;
and I'm stuck in a dizzy spell,
always searching for mine,
even when he's sleeping, only a few doors down
the hall of our North Sea Texas house.
Friend, you showed up one summer day
at the public pool when I was learning to swim
and grabbed my arm as I thrashed in the deep end,
my heart panicking as it thumped chlorine and fear.
Oh you kept me from drowning, boy,
like an angel of the kill-me-kiss me sort.
And you weren't afraid to show me
the Aztec flowers tattooed across your shoulder-blades,
while I acted tough, almost mean.
No, you smiled gen