dad, listen.
there is nothing practical about it.
"love" and "hearts" fall from lovers' lips with the plastic clatter of magnetic poetry
wiped from a mute refrigerator.
love, the making thereof, osculation.
hearts. kisses. love. love. love.

but the endless sky hits a breaking blue sooner or later
and the air i breathe suddenly tastes of a new perfume,
something spectacularly multisyllabic settles, sparkling, on my skin.

a fountain wells up in a thousand eyes.
swells rise, he sighs like a forest.
painstakingly hand-wrought silvery lace crowns
the honest, snow-decked hills and houses.

god glares off the windshield in bright daggers of pure light.
inspiring us to squint dustily into the sunset.

there is only one of us, and i am a woman
right to my toes. dainty,
painted, or propelling sturdy legs along savage sand,
my feet grip the dirt floor of uncertainty. i sweep and sweep,
but the splashing sweetness eradicates the tired gray
dust faster than i can stir it up.
never has a sudden flood of honesty raged so tenderly
through the territory of demons.

he's been kissing my eyelids to sleep for as long as memory, and before that
long into the fog of forgetting.
myriad lifetimes like single bricks in the graceful hulking arching old city bridges
stretch to a silent horizon.

he is a vibrating string, a telescope,
a crackling peal of crystal laughter,
a shattering smash of precise delight,
and army of tiny sighs.

he holds me from afar like a child holds a kite,
one standing fast or skipping in gravity's grasp,
the other made to kick and twist at the wind,
both hit with cool exhiliration,
both laughing with their whole being,
turning the sky to a breaking blue for a hundred miles.