Paris Is Burning

Air fills the space between our palms and the music sometimes seeps in-between our locked fingers to pulse out the rythm of a secret a butterfly once told an Indian grown man and if not a secret,

then a poem that made him smile.

I huddled against the cold wall because I hallucinate in the middle of June and there's no stopping it once it comes along and when you wake up there's a bowl of cherios and a bottle of vodka winking at you from behind the moon (and the moon seems to talk to me with a smile and a flower from the neighbors garden) and there are scars from stars down my legs.

It seems there's an absence of you and the way your hair falls in my face (hairs stand on end and she's screaming to you and you're looking at her eyes bleed the photos of men and women smiling and her mouth drool the sound of happiness, she says, 'a letter for everyday I slept without you, if you're there, you're not

I stopped. and you whispered and bit my shoulders and ears and eyelids with red lips coated in secrets. Cigarette smoke drifted out of my mouth and you caught it with your index finger and pushed it back into your throat like vomit at eleven o'clock.

We stuck to the asphalt; palms, feet, fingers, my spine, your spine, the small of your back, just my spine, kneecaps, and teeth and I giggled and you didn't but smiled anyways at me because things are different when you've had three cups of coffee and enough sleep to make even the worst insomniac feel as if he's slept for days.

Birds hung from the ceiling

and then,

the woman at the top of the steps beckons to me with the imperfection of a school girl, and I stumble towards her without any nerves until I feel the bones of my shins jutting out of my skin and I look at my fingertips and they're stained the color of a sunset over the west Texas (or are they the color of my eyes with a shot of blood and no sleep for eight days?)

stones cut my feet and sweat dripped down my ankles and into my nostrils to fill my mouth with the salty taste of seduction that brought the man down the street to the floor begging for her forearms and her collarbone to rip out his heart and his shoulders.

if there's a right or wrong, man does not know it.