It’s a time of death and grief.
All I hear is ambient noise
as you move in slow motion under
the streetlights saying something
I can’t hear.

They say this country is collapsing
and the headlights cut my eyes like
steel but my mouth is full of ice cream
and this moment is a close up of
your lips between licks.

This sugar tastes like promise,
a quick hit of blind faith as I walk
behind you without looking.
This is the freeze-frame.
Time is ready to shatter but it
must wait for us to cross this night.

I shove what’s left of the cone into
my mouth and crush it into ten, then
twenty, then one hundred little pieces.
A brief ecstasy, perhaps a small act
of desperate gluttony as this street
swallows the light and a family
somewhere loses years together.

This is the last of the warm nights
and I can see the heat sticking to
you as you lick your cone flat.
You say the moon looks beautiful.
I covet the way it holds you and
wraps itself around your body.

I put my arm around you and
lose time in talk and thought–
we cross-dissolve from the moon
to your smile as we ascend the stairs
to my place and I understand you
have the night sky inside of you.

They say they’re coming for everything.
The seconds I count before you’re in my arms.
The breaths between our kisses.
The way we kill distance with our
hands as we take off our clothes.
So let’s make this moment ours–
a flash frame of eternity.
Take my hands in the dark.
Burn them with your stars.
There is a time and place for
sorrow, but it’s not tonight.