Her voice tiny fingers
gently waterfalling down
hidden passageways of my spine,
carving into my sacrum
like the slow spiral dance back
when everything & nothing
mattered.
I want to tell her
I will always take longer to shower
& get dressed
I want to tell her
Sometimes I’m so afraid of dying it’s all
I can do not to go mad
I want to tell her
Our hands: how lost they were
before finding each other
I want to tell her
I’ve made promises I couldn’t keep &
someone somewhere is counting
& if there really is a hell,
I’ll be shoveling coal for a long,
long time
I want to tell her
There’s a pair of shoes you wear
—I think they’re gray—
& it’s petty & judgmental but
I really don’t like them
I want to tell her
I don’t worry about collecting Social Security,
I worry they’ll be no one to pluck
the motherfucking tiny black hairs that grow
in & around my ears when I no longer can
I want to tell her
There’s a picture of you on Facebook,
you’re leaning in toward the screen,
hair long, lips red, bra-less & pushing
against a black tank top:
I keep returning to this picture
again & again & again
I want to tell her
At 48, I’ve no problem getting it up
but worry I’ll either come too fast
or not at all & then
We Might Have to Talk About It
I want to tell her
I know nothing of the sun & the moon,
only that one is quite hot,
the other quite cold —
both rise & fall & we
will never understand just
how like them we are
I want to tell her
I will shed light on all
your dark places,
build a crutch from your smile
for my stumbling heart,
save the last slow
spiral dance
for you.
“Spirals” image by Flickr user Elliot Gilfix
–
Michael Passafiume had been a Brooklyn, NY-based writer for the better part of 22 years and now resides in Southern California where he spends the bulk of his time attempting, in vain, to avoid the sun. His work has appeared in Dirty Chai, Drunk Monkeys, The Louisville Review, MadHat Lit, Meat for Tea, Rust+Moth and The Subterranean Quarterly, among others. His chapbook, archipelagos, was recently published by Blue Hour Press.