GREEN BUTTERFLY

I would like to be
the green butterflies you notice
out the corner of your eye
as faraway a drama teacher studies the beauty in your frown,

I would like to be the memory of
watching  the children you once
played hopskotch with
now re-enacting shakespeare and cobain in
rainy carparks as though the two went together,
to be that common and unthought of at the time
yet somehow part of the backdrop
to when you were at your most carefree
like white tigers passing school gates,
like black butterflies
in a jar of honey or
the corners of photographs　　　
that slipped between burnt thumb and forefinger,
the rest gone to ashes

he thinks what he cannot say, he isn't a poet
all his thoughts turn on a burning rotisserie
but he imagines a trapeze girl tossing a ribboned hoop
over a lion and twilight trying to
find its way through spaces between odd
shaped temples dooms;
all of this in a flick of your hair,
and then that
nirvana tattoo under your December eyes,

I would be inked there forever if I could
while the rain went on dragging the mascara down
mybuttefly white cheeks
like shadow puppets on Chinese lantern paper
you still always smile when it rains
you saw three stars on the sky
it is the tear that will never make its way to your lips,
the salt of someones desire you will never taste.

you carry it with you, and  you only think of it
when you see green butterflies
I'm not sure how the two go together,
its a long distance thing,
a marriage so liquid and ribbon like,
forever breeze and moment caught　
that there is no way it will ever solidify
there  is always thepromise of watching
the sunrise from the rooftop  of the blue seafront house
where you grew up
waiting for dandelions to grow one month out
of the year on the way to school so that　you could get all your wishes
in at once before Christmas

it is something I will never do without you there.　
still, ill fall  asleep sometimes
not at the beach but on the docks
and  listen  to the water, not quite the sea where you  are
but a sea inside when I close my eyes and
think of all the gr bueen tterflies flittering over
its dark silks
reminded of how i would listen to you fall asleep
from across the lines
your smile is a postcard, an empty bench on the pier.
if　you were hear i would watch you sleep in the  same way i watched　
the trees from my window where

I was kept  secluded as a child a thousand  miles from home
not with sadness but longing, not with  love  but wanting
wanting you to know that there is something more than love
will ever be, a conversation  that goes so deep  into  the night
insomnia and adrenaline sets in, and longing becomes so caught up
in itself, in telephone lines and sighs and good byes
so drawn out they have bled into the morning
more stark than Arthur fellig photography and December suicides.
I remember being so tired at work, the thought of you
still clutching my chest

I didn't even feel the  anxiety and the trauma set in,
you kept life at bay and promised to take me away
while I went on breathing nostalgia and clementine
until the days I started to collapse
breathing  the thought of you but never getting close enough
to feel your breath, the thought of your hands　
in gloves  and the polka dot scarf that somehow matched your eyes
stir in the sky, along the course of migrating birds,while the sky　　　
caves in, and  pulls in the city with it
that you almost don't notice you have moved
nauseating, living　
to go on living after coming close to so much beauty
condensed to a single black tear,
all my universe in a parallel life;
its singularity the weight of all oceans
just above your cheek
where your smile is the  last thing to shatter me completely