I was sitting on a bench in a closed classroom,
and you were asking me why I do not look people in the eye;
I tried to divert you from the topic because I didn’t
have the profoundly inky explanation you were hoping to hear,
I simply didn’t know, and I know you didn’t care for simplicity.
Before time knew it, you were telling me how you don’t feel, and I
was blind and deaf to the concept, and too many questions
were spinning inside of me like a continuum of blizzards
until certain sentences barely had words and some had
14 question marks, but by then you had already pushed me
against the wall and the vowels, and consonants, and punctuation
marks slowly balanced themselves on the top of my floating ribs
as if I were a snow globe.
The next evening, the second and last day of us,
you suggested we run barefoot on grass reeking of concoctions
churned by setting suns and birdsongs to soothe the 7 types of pain
I felt in my feet from walking in shoes
that weren’t meant for me. And we did, with you pointing
out 4 goalposts with your arm half exposed under a clumsily
rolled up shirt sleeve, with me looking for the lipstick stains
on your collar that had mysteriously disappeared, with us, two
strangers, spending an evening made of yellowed-out pages of
a Mills and Boon, until it was time for us to never talk again.
In every remembrance of our 48 hour rendezvous
I would ponder how one couldn’t feel until exactly
365 days after us
I began tearing into people’s souls through their eyelashes,
and dancing them into scratched vinyls of Presley,
with my heart only being an audience
of only an abandoned stage
with only a spotlight illuminating
only particles of dust.
