love poem with milk stains

i think of you in your favorite sweater

and weep. i’m in the local coffee shop,

by the way, and feeling like a creation.

like something that was made to survive

the end of the world.

i’m too peculiar to go out in an ordinary way

but i’m not selfish. i’ll take what i can get.

(the sweater has two holes,

one in the right wrist

and one across the collar.

like a lover took a knife

and put them there so that you might breathe.)

i’m a disaster in slow motion, the kind

you have to step back from to notice.

a wave the ocean rejected, behemoth

and hungry for a taste of humankind.

i want to view this from afar and above.

i want the lemons on cutting boards,

the infectious peals of laughter,

the radio-wave sun.

i want you, whole and returned to me,

like an artifact from an ancient civilization.

i stormed because i believed this to be the only way to devour.

i grew blue-hot under the tormented moon.

(the sweater is blue, and knows your scent like a dog)

in the coffee shop, they don’t take to weeping lightly.

take your existentialism elsewhere.

they play soft music

make mute conversation.

so i order that drink you like.

that i always pretended to like too.

you and your rickety holiness.

patron saint of tidal waves and sweaters.

most days i feel like a thing spinning in the rafters.

left to find my way to the ground after the party is long gone.

and all these strange stares, animal.

this, at long last, is an exhalation.

all the things i have wanted to say.

loss became a hole just beneath my left atrium.

like breathing could hold you there.