I lay in bed sticky with sweat under thick wool blankets, your body clinging, sticking, hugging mine. My breathing still heavy from lust, my cheek tender from your stubble rubbing on mine, I gazed out your window, half open to moderate the heat with an icy winter breeze, as the bare branches of a tree swayed in the wind, bobbing to a rhythm I tried to count.

Crunch crunch crunch under my feet, boots salt stained and wet like my face
Wipe out street crossings and wind that gusts to push me along patches of black ice
“have you been crying”
“its just the wind”
And those bruises are just from tumbles, slip ups
Try not to land face down

It’s scarier to touch and feel nothing, to not want you, to not feel a flush of heat as confirmation, because if lust has already drowned in indifference, no matter how I think you’re different, then I can’t but wonder what it might take to wake something so dormant before it rusts. 
If I cast these feelings out to sea and they just drift back into the harbour to sink then will the seawater slow their degradation or will they just get chewed up by propellers and beaten by sunken skipping stones? It’s a silly line of questioning anyways, I haven’t seen the sea in months, only freshwater fountains in public squares where I toss the pennies that are my thoughts and make a wish to have emotions rather than , things to express through words rather than brute physicals sensation. I wish to be the master of my own body and mind and heart and I throw pennies and quarters and shoes and myself into this shallow fountain and I lie facedown stubbornly refusing to breathe but it’s the first day of fall and they’re draining the water away, shouting at me as I lie there, half wet, crazed

the pace of your steps and the way the wind gusts, blowing dust and dead leaves just recently released from winter into your eyes are the only two things i can think about. later on it will be with hesitation and regret that i try to recall your facial expressions as you looked at me every few steps (i always looked down and to the left) or where your arms fell and what shapes your hands made.
stupid details i wish i could summon to gleem some significance from because you’re so fucking inscrutable the way you just nod when i say nothing. i didn’t say anything, forget it. not today.
maybe tomorrow.

Empty warehouses and burned out lots and boarded up windows (typical).
Urban decay reclaimed . Again, living the dream of the 1970s by the train tracks all over again, much the same for them but new to me I guess.
So you’re jaded about your town the way I a m about mine, so let’s switch places, discovery an d excitement or maybe its better to meet in the middle (better with than without you).
So let that cutesy indie pop echo in an empty loft when the punk show downstairs fades out, or let’s listen to bikini kill at whisper volume so we don’t wake the roommates when at 4 am we need a soundtrack to that first touch of hands, uncertain again the third time as much as the first because we put years between each touch so that its the first time each time

Summer fiction:
running yrself down to empty like it’s just to prove a point about how you don’t need anyone’s help to fill you up again. sillygoofysexdrunkgrinningwide, falling all over ourselves.
grasping- clutching at skin that flushes with the blood rush to your head to your core to your fingers. Pale, turning red with flushes of heat at each others words and touches and looks, soni look away.
i measure the distance to you in street numbers 12th to 21st and three blocks west, alley entrance to the basement suite, second bedroom to the left and we twist and turn and stay up all night and it never seemed like much to you and it never seemed like much to me and it’s not much at all anyways is it really but what matters is the rush from holding your breath a little too long, from standing on your head, the heat stroke and the 420 stairs and our bodies pink in the sun, burning so we can’t touch.
what matters is we’re burning so we can’t touch.