Un-peopled
in a room where people sit in a circle behind tables,
where sounds are exchanged gently from hand-to-hand,
I sit with no hands to speak of, tapping my foot
and touching my knees,
as if no one can see.
the taste of food is strange with metal,
and I miss you within the hour.
everyone is mimicking the features of your face,
as my eyes reconstruct them somehow
into familiarity that is as empty
as a basement.
I came to worship such silence with
deafening reverence and insatiable climate—
a city constructed from memory.
a place of no people.
I pave these streets with folly.
hands pressed with ice
red overlay masked in ghost-skin
coats the night.
it is pressed up against ice and air-
each splitting each other.
a cling of rope and breath.
our necks and shoulders were
boarded up towns of our immediate past:
half scorched with lust and shadows of pressure
making our chest bones ache with sweat.
learning the local tongue of gestures
in some common place we lend ourselves
to subtle connections in moment spread.
I am sweet with touch and clung to,
strummed apart by fingers-
careless and wide
fumbled in all its strength and late to rise.