
First Kiss
Holding a memory in my mouth
Feeling the shape and all the grooves of it with my tongue
Like a projection it is playing on the inside of my mind
Behind my eyes I watch like a daydream
The untamed abandon of a child’s dance displayed
Lights flashed and music pulled like waves
In a dark corner, in haste, you kissed me with a kind of mechanical fervor
Meant not to linger but to move steadily on to the next touch.
After you dispensed my first kiss
A fire poured from me
And in defiance of your loudly proclaimed indifference
Your eyes flashed for a moment red and gold.
How old we felt even then, the two of us babies
You had the most empty house I had ever seen
And even after you threw stones at me and tried to suffocate my Combustion
I couldn’t bring myself to hate you for
That empty house and the barren loneliness I felt the day I visited you there.
My home was packed and moving onto unknown places
Left behind would be the wide adobe doorway with all the little tallies of Growth
Like a church it was a place of ritual.
For years tiny bodies standing up straight, heels pushed hard against the Wood
Chins shining upward, hoping to cast the full height of each measuring
In our hearts sometimes we are taller than the pencil marks reflect.
With a kind of childish wisdom I thought not much at all
of leaving the monument behind.
The tides of change had come in and already we were sailing away
Companions who would become strangers sooner than we knew
Reveling in the mystery
Excitement delivered. Lighting bolts of fear
Striking each of us, an environment of desperate joy and terror.
I remember you, a babe scouting the world
Running away at night from an arid house of spirits.
And remember how you set a blaze and then tried to put it out
A pyre that has burned for years, still burns and lights our faces
Lights the images playing on a reel
Tastes of the memory I hold in my mouth.
