Sunny spot on the deck

I could sit in this moment
and watch world go by.
I could stay
in this sunny spot on the deck
before the rest of the world wakes up
and let time move through me.

Except the neighbors baby
Who cries and cries and cries to be helped.
Cries for someone to fix what hurts without knowing what it means to hurt.
How I want
so badly to yell “baby! It’s okay, baby. You will find peace, baby!”
I want so badly to share with them
this feeling of stillness.
To carry them into my state of serenity.

I didn’t know all it would take
to feel this way
is this sunny spot on the deck.
A place I stumbled hazily into;
a place of overwhelming calm.
A place
I’ve been searching for
day after day after day.
Night after night.
Searching
in the graffiti of bar bathrooms and apartments of fake friends,
in the beds of men who think reading is a personality.
Begging for a clue.
Yearning to make a connection.
A modern day Sherlock Holmes.

A terrible detective I didn’t
think I’d find it
between your sleepy kisses
on the top of my head,
a gentle interruption of the warm rays of light as I sit
in this sunny spot on the deck.
A moment to feel the fangs of the cold morning air on my neck as I look up at you;
a bite that takes me out of my place of tranquility and drops me into this one.

When I came out here I thought I would think all the thoughts I could think until I had
no more thoughts left to think.
But all I can think about is your voice through the sliding glass door singing to yourself and I imagine
you in your own Garden of Eden the way I am in mine and I pray
we are in the same one.

I want
to come inside and dance with you but I’m not ready
to leave this sunny spot on the deck where I don’t feel
anything.
This place where I can simply be,
where things I don’t know yet can’t hurt me.
Where the world has stopped for me,
for just a moment.
If I come inside I am afraid to lose this illusion of myself as whole.
And the illusion of us
in this other dimension
where we can be together.