Tasting Pretty

Oh, The Taste of Pretty Things

Wake up, lovely,
I’ve made some breakfast and started a fire.
Put on some clothes and come down for coffee.
I stare out the window and fade,
having spoken with spring. Butterflies
are leaping from my mouth,
to drown in our black coffee, we drink,
full of a pageantry of colors and wings.
Oh, the taste of pretty things.
It’s easy to smile. Try to turn pumpkins into carriages,
to take us away from wisdom and decision.
To break against reservations and beach thought
and allow my hands to swim into your high tide,
so much adrenaline running through my veins.
Hungers are attended to and forgotten.
Dipped toast eyes into warm coffee
mingled with the color and substance of butterflies.
At night, on our backs staring into a starry sky,
asking questions like what’s the purpose,
who am I? What makes a galaxy?
How does one really know? When we are hungry,
we are driven to eat. When we live on Earth,
the sun is the most important star in the universe.
There is nothing factual about this, but tell that to
someone who is starving and has no sustenance.
Tell that to Apollo, who the sun makes a God.
Tell that to Icarus, as his wings melted and he plummeted
to the ground. Fables need to be able to explain things.
The rhetoric of the fridge humming, the clang of dishes
as we eat. The sound of me scraping the walls for your breaths.
The silence of psychic glances, that incessantly cause me to laugh
because you stopped me coming home at night to dream of magic carpet rides.
Each time I stare at your perfection, this meal tastes
like it was ordered by an ordinary person who
always wanted what they could never have,
so they pretended to be someone else
ordering food they never learned to want
because they never learned who they were
and part of that is knowing what tastes good.
You do, in so many ways. You make strong poems
in me. I mean, I’m seasoning coffee with butterflies.
I have just gotten off the telephone with my childhood,
whose told me this is all I ever wanted,
so why am I so afraid the butterflies are poisonous?
I know they are surely not.
Each sip you take, I hold my breath, baby,
and wait for you to exhale again, which
makes me wonder if I’ll ever just relax
and find the magic in being cozy
when the floors are cold on our naked feet
and there’s no reason to leave bed,
to believe you’ll still want to have coffee with me
when there’s no more butterflies left to put in our coffee.