Compasses and Charts

It's nothing, I'm an octopus.

Morning winds laying low fencing, setting loose livestock, driving us to crisis mode but days ago, lives ago.

Jacking off into her mouth, kneeling after to kiss the corners, clean it up, feed it back, tongue to tongue.

The thrill of being where one is only.

Vermont into Massachusetts and the other way around, and all the times we talked going back and forth, and all that we talked about, most of which I've forgotten, but still, Vermont into Massachusetts and the other way around. 

Sunlight on phone lines, on the wings of crows, red-wing blackbirds.

It's nothing, don't worry, forget about the fluorescence, I'm a telepathic cephalopod, I got this.

Mummified strangers haunting museums and otherwise complicating our long study of death.

Not wanting to examine one's attraction to opals for basically obvious reasons.

Let there be light and also cattle parades on the Fourth of July and people that hate cotton candy as much as I do.

Let there be a woman just for me and also let me find her soon! 

It's too pretty and amazing to be nothing but we can't tell anybody about it or they'll think we're crazy so we'll call it nothing but cherish it privately or in really small groups that can't be readily labeled. 

Rain in me, sun in me, now and forever.

Walt Whitman in me silent before Jesus in me silent before Emily Dickinson reminding us what we're doing here and who's in charge et cetera.

Blue underwear that weeks later still makes me hard, closing my eyes and seeing her, back turned and arms upraised against the wall of her childhood home, hips undulating and - oh wait - am I not supposed to say this?

Straining at the fiddle, especially in 6/8 time (which Dan said never say again is just a waltz trying to get away from its father issues).

Still in Dublin in some ways, and still in some ways on the west coast near the ancestral village getting head in an open field surrounded by sheep.

"Lower your voice, you'll wake the kids," she says a minute or two before crying out into the pillows coming, loud enough to wake the kids.

Strange gifts we didn't ask for, can't refuse or return, yet late in life are revealed as compasses and charts which - oh right, I forgot, sorry.

It's not that the ocean is a church but that there's no such thing as churches, and not even really oceans, or octopuses for that matter, but we'll get to that in another poem because this is the twentieth sentence, this is where he says we have to stop.