Touch Talks Touch, Definitive Us,We and They as Pronouns

Look-alike Paul Newman’s ogle, I gawked it. You introduced us to each other the first night my us was I and you. I wanted we inside him, the sound surface,trade-marked modern. Instead we was lying with your defects on a crusty mattress.

Us was the porch that had housed our first affair. The splintered love-seatwhere your drugged digits slithered my stoned smidgeon. Was we, now liquidated. You nipped my thighs into the skin of plums. An ache for splattered gums. Got off on your disfigurement. Ours, us. Opposite of attraction. The he tempted otherwise. Rugged appetite. To be varnished by his brawn…

In a windy bar, I realized he was feasible. Baited by the birthday cougar, he had no loyalty to the bare mobile upload figure. In my go-go dress, with my blossom clip, I could staff the Beauty Bar, he said. Bar-maiden beauty. Post burgers, he murmured something about Chi-City candy. I contemplated a woozy lick. Instead he spectated sterile breeding and conked out flat in the hallway. Until two seasons later, I thought it was girlish fiction,

the idea of it. But suddenly he was flesh. I fell into his flannel and we caught up. Your name was casual, shared. I isolated it, made it mine. He let me keep, making a claim you never will. Certain that he witnessed adoration on a conditioned couch, he said your conquests didn’t matter, just as, though a they with a matriarch, he played us with me. Kept bountiful bones, beloved. Flesh we, a bit. There’s brevity in every lust.

He thrummed, sneaking glances at my platform lacking dance. I did not see his eyes, but he confessed them later. Tied them to my tasseled muscles, flattering. His tongue dripped fructose, calling me a Popsicle. Sweetmeat lush. Something of the sort. Sentimental, lusty, I was his announcement to the van. Glad to have me, even grateful. He slipped into the backseat to squeeze my arm for emphasis. In the old rental, that seat built a fort and housed the us I raised with you. Now, held in the owned space, no sarong walls hid our us. Us being rhythmic lips matching drunken music. Mouths moving with tunnel time-warp vocals. Chill as shoegaze,  patient bodies. Faded boy and blurry I faded to

the drummer’s guest house, wanting for a we on the kitchen floor. He was his hands. I was my jeans. A blacked-out belt removal attempted we. A flash of something practiced tempted. Memory whispers a curse for something not on hand.   A sleepy vision a sleeping bag scuttle cut short shows us unpeeled, thwarted. The sample propagates passion. But more so, that unmade us reconstructs our us, touch talking touch. I could still be yours in spite of every other inch you’ve covered. Handling is remarkably isolated. We were my only us. Advertising yourself

as an I, you stumbled into isolation, into bars, out of bars, into them, still an I in their beds, back into us in the morning. We were we in the streets, on the road, in hotels, on futons, on floors, on pull out couches, on hammocks, on playgrounds. Us in pools, in tents, in tree houses, in a library, in your mother’s garden, on parking garages, in a storage unit, in your truck. A we in the triangle van, at the dock, at the thrift store. On a bloody mattress in your hometown, we were us, our us, us was our. Then you howled to me

on India Street. I did not hear you. You screwed into a they across town. I slept as an I, and you did not sleep, not in her arms. What were you part of then, lost on the city streets, not even an I? You returned to our us and you swore we were us. But my nauseous-stomach-I had wandered sidewalks and wept on the subway with the boys in your band. You did the same until I put your exhaustion to sleep with a tactile lullaby. And that night I cried mute because us had ran off. The day before you had told me that the us in my eyes

was a figment I’d placed there. Plastic us in a snow globe. She shook she shook you, placed you on a shelf in a New York gift shop. The we I keep is only a memento. The us that was in a dome, untouched. Your lonely I touching, touched, outside of my snow, my reminder of Brooklyn. Touch, touch, touch strangled us. But there is us. Rumored us. Remembered us. I have us, but you is what I call you. You have hands, not touch. You are only a you.