Fever Dream

You could write a Russian novel
About the things that might have happened
If I'd just turned round
Your face is an open book
I never got around to reading
Put on the spot in the middle of your
Porch
I can't determine your meanings

You told me once
crowded inside a booth you don't have to understand it to mean it,
You winked an eye and for a moment I thought I saw your freckles connect
In some  familiar constellation
Slid your menu and a gaze
At me wishing I could throw a gaze like that (I got brave)
I went for your hand instead
Your grasp, every strand of your hair felt like a revelation
I joked we didn't need words we were better and cooler than all of them
And I didn’t know then, but I know it now

(We could have said it with our spoons

 and (cut though the) knives and pools of syrup left behind)
I never knew there was enough to ask for more

Why I'm at your door smoking through the past like a fever dream
Wishing for all the things,
Caught in an imaginary crowd,
where your hand slips from mine,

in the dark you keep playing the light-switch I can never find

/There’s nothing inside my sleeves

But my own recycled imaginings/

every nights a recurring scene
/ Suicide plots are tangled in my sheets
My teeth are falling out /
tragedy’s
being born with arms much too short for a girl like you
Sometimes I go on,
there aren't enough sad songs on the radio,  because every now and then it has to be morning

Even if I open my eyes
I can never seem to reach you