and so we would balance, tangled in

the endless fountain of youthfully webbed ecstasy. our

insignificantly significant fingers would

catch, entwining together in an unbroken cliche,

too familiar to be anyone’s truth and in final essence too 

ethereal. 

and so our touch would cling to the fury in fantasy, 

alighting on the wingtips of the love-lost and abandoned. 

the eager, the lonely, the wishers and dreamers 

would become our lovers and friends, and so we all would toast

to the future and the present, the past a hazed and distant untruth. 

with the frantic chill of tears and the ache of dusk’s muted

violet-blue starvation 

we would turn for solace to monarchs and devils and this barren universe for which 

we dance and sing and pray and love. we would shut our eyes as kings long gone 

stretched out their hands, and in their palms 

bloomed the clean pastels of a young blossom, petals lending pigment to a world

begging for beauty.

there would be no absolution but the clouds

as reflected off your pupils into mine 

would give some solidarity in symmetry.

and 

in your eyes i would see the ripples of a clean truce and the final fantasy of a summer lily. 

no shuttered windows would distract

from our perfectly aligned shadows, merging 

opposite us on the sidewalk. 

and so we would sit. 

we would speak with full and unwashed expression 

and danger and devil would shirk

but only shirk

as our eyes would meet and our fingers would lose each other in each other.