the mesh of a contusion i. the heat of your hormones beats through well-worn trails, tigers push through weak bivouacs. an opportunity to catch a dragonfly arises, drawn irresistibly like a kite pulled to its grounding. natural as an outbreak of brushfire, you caress her white skin feeling as if your world had never ended the first time. tendrils turning towards her sun, burning as if molten gold filled your cavity, you yearn to drench your incandescent center in her timeless tides. your mind's eye erases our sketches, the dandelion seed is supplanted. you are engulfed as if rising through loaves of bread, only to crash into a detailed picture of pale sunrise hair, near an aquiline face. her eyes are like the skies in heaven, but her laugh will be sharp hoes, cutting rows in your gentle landscape. ii. this spider's gossamer unspins, an orbit corrupts. a starling falters and plummets towards earth, the wide ocean. sight fades gray like a cat's paw, creation's air rushes out of this compressed chamber. ground crumbles into spineless fossils, time holds still like a lingering reflection of late sun on steel green buildings. morphine can hardly quell the phantom limb, pictures curl, ochred on carpet in abandon. a swan lake dancer became disabled from your steps that nightfall. cinderella was only a poor girl after all. my mind's engravings rotate in a museum's halls, lying in bed, waiting to die takes longer than all afternoon. there was a vacuum waiting to be unsealed, tomblike. dust of the ages will rise and spell the same story, written in more than three languages.