Your eyes make me feel trapped inside myself.
Alone in my bed, I could move my feet
and make static sparks* appear
like asterisks
I could remember all the different kinds of sparks*
bonfires
*lightning bugs
brakes

With you, there is one steady candle flame
burning like a yellow moon—
this is a constant reminder
of all the things I’ve read about intimacy*
This is highlighter yellow

and I want to be like a cloud of fireflies,
a trick of the light*
the way they disappear and reappear but never totally vanish.
A memory* glimmering in the purple dusk.

*Fireflies are constantly being sucked through
wormholes of peaceful night air.
What I mean to say is they teleport*
like footnotes
like hyperlinks
I can remember all the places to hide.
I had a night light
and glow-in-the-dark stars
I used to be afraid of things in the dark
and now I’m afraid* I am one of them
The *trick of the light is that you can’t use it to see
and still keep your hiding place*

like a blinking cursor
I want to be a beautiful possibility*
but I also kind of want to disappear,
energy* vacillating in between
created and destroyed.

my first real hippies
I agreed minus the drugs
they’d lived on a commune
high in the mountains
where years later I caught trout
a professor’s social experiment

her hand went up and down like a ‘coaster
she said their relationship had been like that
she said life was like that
she made huckleberry pancakes
and scared the black bear out of the garden

he took me to the lake
he wrote songs for me
he gutted fish for me
I thought he meant every word he said

she was better than jumper cables
he said, for a bed companion
what I’d always feared, here’s proof
that he wanted to marry, not just me

2000 miles away
as the light across the parking lot fades
in long orange rectangles
the power line catches and gleams
beauty that provides
understanding her hand will rise