i like you
& when we’re together,
i want to paint myself in clothes that don’t belong,
taking pictures of you in the same
as we strut along the main strip street downtown,
the shadow of our selves hardly in tow for the hour
to ride a passenger train far past those green mountains
where no one has yet heard of the city lights
& tear back thru the dense dark of the metropolis,
senses overwhelmed by neon set ablaze
to find a shoebox to make home a stone’s throw from your tire swing-
whitewashed, with warm books, a piano downstairs-
where i'll ask you to pass milk for my coffee sunday mornings,
the memories of a broken young man's black blood far behind
to spread new soil every march atop the new england ground
from which a garden may spring into summer’s green yield
where we’ll lie in the grass full of brandy & champaign,
winter’s warm drunk like wool sweaters left behind
to not fear in the half-light as our past-life dreams are paved over,
the years made to spend spread out mostly behind us
for all along, tho we were but two simple dilettantes, madly in love,
it is hard to say that what we made was not art