Figure Drawing

It was his turn to trace her.

The microscopic folds of her wrist

Parsing a youthful vernacular,

Seemed to sigh

Under the current of his calloused refraction.

He prayed she could not feel him staring.

He watched her chest rise,

Like a magnet spinning hydrogen

Between two lungs,

Every atom composed 
Strings of electric soliloquies

That rewrote themselves

With every fall.

He could taste the heat

Coming off her;

She was a solar flare of quartz and rain.

His eyes flashed

And his fingers seized the carbon

That was slowly slipping from his grasp.  

His palms were black and smudged

From artless musing.

It was his turn to trace her. 

Desideratum

The necessary escapes

the threads of detail

and loses itself in pattern,

patchwork printing over loves and past loves

of the films we’ve unspooled

in our ribcage projectors.

We proceed in a manner of adaptation,

merging our bodies to slip in between

touch and time

moving through the confines of space –

our minds wandering the infinitum of paradoxes

that paint themselves over

with play and persuasion.   

We become children in a museum.

We crave the novelty of our own imaginations

and race each restless thought

to the edge of its frame.

We tilt the world

to watch one canvas bleed onto the next

and wait for gravity to surrender

so we can call it beautiful.

And of all the perfect absurdities,

we grow up 

to lose their basic necessity.