Blue

"Blue"

I’m trying to find something she left,

A kiss that has long been taped to my mind

It was left there long ago, by someone who had no business
inside my skull

But found her way there, during a sweaty afternoon, complete
with grass stains and sword cuts that stretched like clues on puzzle pieces
from her limbs to mine

At one point that kiss was an itch, a scar carved upon my
memories, that blocked the flow of daily traffic, always taking my thoughts
through detours towards that afternoon, when without a moment’s notice, she
planted that kiss upon my life

I would spend days taping, rock hammer rapping at the side
of my skull, splintering bone and feeding air to that starving scar. Desperate
to keep it alive, to force feed nourishment into the scar, to keep it crisp, to
keep it breathing, humming, dancing between life and death. 

But I simply write around that kiss. As I reach into my
skull, digging for that scarred memory, as my own irritated bone tears into my
finger flesh, I can’t find it. I feel its leaving, its moving, I feel its
smiling dance away from memorialization 

My blood soaked fingers return to the keyboard, angrily
jumping above letters, unable to find a way to cover that kiss in words and
wrench it away from the world and into my chest. 

What was it that made it so special, that even if I can’t
remember it, I feel like I must, I feel like I will always be lost if I don’t.

The darkness isn’t helpful. It is filled with no one to whom
I can turn. No one whom I can imagine would understand a kiss like this. To
most kisses are like bland bands of suburbs squatting upon the earth, with lips
exchanging sugar and tongues sneaking secret trysts. 

Who could understand a kiss that rises towards the heavens
like a cathedral of the sky? Perhaps she…

I type this line:

The woman who could kiss empires into oblivion, what would
she say?

With the next line I type, my pact is struck. I write her
into existence before me, hoping she will carry with her a quiver of words
forged from the fragments of a sublime kiss. 

In a haze she appears, her skin stained with the heat of
fresh paint.

But there’s something… 

I struggle to write of her. With each attempted word of her
form, the ink runs dry, and the tip blindly gashes the paper, tearing through
each page. Typing of her flesh creates a similar empty clicking. No matter what
I type, no matter how I dance thrash, the page remains blank, like a white mist
of Sisyphus. 

She remains beyond my ability to symbolize. But I can still
hear her words, and they are all I can mirror with words of my own. 

She says: 

This kiss is a wound that becomes life. 

A scar without respect for what you want, what you feel. It
will fade when you want to glorify it and it will glare at the world when you
want to hide it.

Before I can say anything, she moves closer, so close, I
worry I will disappear.

This kiss, will feel like an ocean. 

When she reaches me, my eyes crash shut, and I can feel my thoughts
plunge into an empty but boiling sea, flittering like those infamous ships that
once followed her lips.

I was once stone, rock, solid, but now I am the sand upon
which fools build their homes. I am the sands that glide between your toes as
you curiously watch wet scattered mountains gush beneath you. I am a map
redrawn in your wake. 

I am the coastline upon which near drowned sailors breathe
again, thanking heaven and earth for the chance to gasp again. 

I emerge, heaving upward like the chest of life

Staring outward towards the sea, where the blue, the blue of
the sky and sea woven together like a band around my wrist, is the blue of that
day, of that kiss