waves crash.

Dear hydrogen cloud whose fingers wrap around my heart to keep it from beating,

I can smell you in the curved glass.
You are the sense memory brought close by a simple trick of physics,
But you are real enough that I cannot breathe through you.

I can taste you in the open eyes.
The eyes that burn in sleepless fission.
The eyes that beg for a new century
Already.

You are the perfect simplicity.
The sound of honey that is breathing under water in the large,
Sad-eyed droplet of a summer storm that will never end because I, in love, kissed her hard in it
And so will live forever there
If I am redeemed of all my other sins.

You touch the key that lingers underneath the songs we sing together
And alone
In the thousand armed Kali of America.

And you see the hungry evidence of lilacs and the hollow carved-out hope of miles dying underneath our scars and open lungs
Our broken, arrogant hearts that do nothing but promise
Exactly because when the waves crash and shatter
When they howl and starve and carve and break and cower
When they revenge and resist
When they give off and give out and give up and give in
When they believe,
Promises are plenty.