by Taylor Wallace

                If I thought of myself as an egg 
                Fully able to turn over 
                And continue frying, 
                You would be the olive oil 
                That tore my skin 
                As I waited to hear your number 
                And you quietly insisted on my request,

Those six hairs defying the rest of your features.

                Until I reasoned I should return 
                To a pdf manuscript on novels, knowing
                Quite eventually, 
                That I shuffled 
                In the steel-drum cacophony of sleep. 

Potassium will burn out —> Sulphur —> burns green.

		   I want to be the belt of elastic 
		   Beneath your striped cotton waist, fastened
      		   Just above the goose-bumps that hold your pubic hair,
    	  	   Where motes gather your expired epidermis. 

Pericles defended against Xerxes —> gets exhilaration in return

                Yet, displaying a request for bowling
                On the New-York-City kiosk of your face
                Never makes it past the advertising team
                And I instead turn the page of my printout.

Alex the Great —> proved self via horsemanship —> pressure
Defines rulesmanship

                     Live with me to be eighty
                     And we’ll catch all the clouds
                     We have yet named
                     By their phylum, species, and order,
                     And craft the precocious breath of a rare breeze
			   So we may come to be like
			   Summer greens           &
			   Their impermanent weather.

                     I wish to bring you to contact
                     On an exquisite quilt and easy murmurings
                     To hide your figure with my voice
                     And your Frida-Kahlo attitude. 

Alex —> politically overcomes to expand eastward —> creates city-states

              — and one would imagine this should motivate me 
              To insist we go bowling, 
              Yet when I have established
              That you will not show, here you walk
              With a green cardigan and charcoal hat
              That I have not seen, mildly swaybacked
              At the sandwich station
              As I clutch my cookie
              And paper cup 
              Between thinning fingers.

When the light came in to look through the morning
Upon what should have been your face
And my sheets 
Melting from your shoulders,
There was only the foam of sugared remains
In a speckled mug 
Of old Lipton tea.