Give me love:
at a slow twentysomething, summer raindrops off the nose & into the eyes, squinted. You & the blacktop & two thin bands of rubber; stoplights, ignored & irrelevant anyways, pretty in reflection. Turns taken wide & low, feeling yourself sink (somehow, sideways, still holding) into pavement. Feel it & love it & wish you were uninhibited enough to shout it, 2am residential neighborhoods be damned & echoing.
in a bookshelf written by poets, dead French & otherwise & all at once, too; books of Proust & Palestine; empty bottles of wine; books mostly still tagged 'Used' by the campus bookstore. Books that maybe I gave you, that maybe I should read, scattered all of them on & off shelves, in piles or piled singularly between under or on clothes & cds, posters, paintings, letters.
for a roommate you sometimes wish you knew & sometimes cannot anymore stand, dressed partly in a towel (partly not at all) wishing entirely you weren't awake & in the living room watching her rummage through a kitchen bowl: condoms, candies, dollar, tampon.
in spite of whatever keeps me up thinking of the her here & the her there & the imminent reversal, trying to quantify or estimate or just crudely guess if what I feel is attenuation or actuality; wondering how much damage a cup of coffee truly can do: is this heartburn or heartbreak?
for a book just good enough to read, not enough to stay up for: that perfect sentence, that perfect bottle of wine. But somehow, bitterly, I know it's not the words nor the grapes nor the grammar nor the wood it sat in; it's context, goddamn context; context in the moment & context in the mind. Even the best bottle of wine, that one with the beautiful label art & downright brilliant writing on it, too, will be wasted when all I can stomach anymore is P.B.R. & a porno.
So give me something worth reading: something for the moment, something for just. right. now.