The Last Time I Beheld Beauty

you spilled from my fingertips. I painted the sunrise in puddles of your faded expressions and grew cities from the glimmer of smiles burning in your eyes I could swim in the cerulean blue of your mile-wide iris, or drown myself in the trenches beneath your eyelids that fill with tears whenever you cry; mapping oceans on your face in streams and rivers I tripped on the acoustics of your bedroom; the sleepy curls in your hair did nothing but amplify the sound of my fall and smother me when I found the floor with my hips, you built the curve of my lips from guitar strings. the gales that blew you into my life whipped my hair around my face and shivered between my ribs making breathing hard and speaking harder than the concrete that found my creaking bones whenever you left me lonely enough to rot and turn to sodden mush for you to squish between your fingers I don't believe that you were ever Heavenly or that you knew anything more than the Bible said about yourself and others, but your book could never explain to grieving mothers whose child had died at birth why the corpse in her arms was destined to burn. Summer spun itself in circles around my fingers like hoops around the waist of seven year olds, too innocent to know their own ignorance, I guess we've all been there, some of us just didn't grow up Woe is me, I cannot see past my own hands, which I have firmly clamped over my eyes so I can pretend not to notice all the horrors I claim to believe in.