seventyninedegrees

reheated spring.
the sun came out of the white overhead,
turned the clouds into a comforter
my fellow pedestrians and I are sweating under.
 
goddamn medium spring.  
like a last release of steam from the calendar/time machine
before December ignores the amount of lotion I use
and breaks open my knuckles. winter+my  
daily fistfights. Seventy-nine degrees.  
 
seems to be  
last chance for that eighteenth-birthday dress
that blue number I wore to infiltrate the solemn gray
of my city's conservative courthouse/cage  
in which I wrote my real name
and etched my fuzzy-legged, tight little frame  
in the city employees' memories
ha. wrote myself
down like I am for coffee when I shouldn't be
down like where my most intense lover thus far
went, while I sipped lovely black drink
and chugged incense and old familiar eyes.
this poem wasn't even supposed to be about that.
speaks for itself.
its influence on me. the memory-turned-fantasy so tempting
like a weak antelope would bother the D.A.R.E. lion. it's a trail I can trace.
"no" is mostly something I can't just  
say when  
all over again
I feel the steam on my chin and my caffeine headache of the day melting
because he made me not need or want a cup until the evening, ohhh, god the
the freshness of sobriety stone-cold and and
and what he's doing with his tongue, I can
feel it even in my fingers and toes
and I need to stop tracing and start drawing
actual art
learn my own morse code
and translate the rhythms
throbbed / telegrammed by my heart
I don't know. I don't know.
I want to carve him in my skin
because he persists
like the "F" on my birth certificate.
fuck it all, fuck it,
stop showing up in my dreams,
 
he loved that dress on me. under sunshine
my coldness has kicked in again
 I think of him fondly
but can't find it in me to miss him,
I let my thoughts off-leash
because they are not my slaves, and that makes me
remember and remember and remember,
how am I supposed to think.