I want to talk with you of cabbages and kings, and whether pigs have wings - and if they do, will they take me to you? I want to fit in every word I can. Choosing which stories to share is like choosing which kitten gets to live. I want to welcome them all. But I also crave silence. Words are what connected us, but after all, just man-made symbols. I want to just be, to have no need to prove myself, to need no verbal crutches to assure me I'm who I need to be, where I need to be.

I feel like some moony eyed girl in a '50s song, weaving her dreams into the silk gauze of her canopy bed, and you the backbone of it all, the paper cone the cotton candy builds on, rests on. So much anticipation for one kiss. In the song, that's where it ends. In my dreams it's just the beginning, the key unlocking the doors between us. It's getting so I rummage my memory for small talk stories and find yours as easily as mine. Is this being codependent, proof of inadequate boundaries, or is it just called falling in love?

You say her name over and over as if in a trance. Your eyes are hollowed, you stand like a wallflower at a dance. Words are meant for communication, transporting ideas, like that educational cartoon where they're carried on the backs of efficient worker ants. You're tangled up in a made up romance, a forest of verbigeration. Are you searching these woods for answers or simply hiding in their branches, convinced an honest embrace only waits for you in dreams? You stroke her name like worry beads. I tiptoe around saying goodbye to who you were, offer you hot tea.

You get on the bus and see a familiar face, with downturned eyes and a slapdash smile like a waitress might draw on the bill for your BLT if the mood struck. She seems lost in a reverie, remembering an old joke. But the smile is meant for you. You sit near her, say nothing. Soon the bus passes a church mobbed with people, a limo out front. The bells are so loud they vibrate your bones. You wish you could celebrate your feelings in the sunshine like that. You'll just have to settle for knowing your love is true.

The wind carries words from the past, borne through mandibles now scattered like discarded paper plates, claimed by moss as part of the landscape, their teeth mistaken for rocks, stubborn stumbling blocks to your picnic. On frontal bones, fuzzy larvae undulate, grotesque Groucho eyebrows wagging sinister warnings. Organs long ago claimed by decay and lucky crows, all that's left are fragments of calcium framework, what once propelled warriors now flotsam from the pockets of the vanquished. Their spirits thread through you in icy squalls. Their deaths unquiet and fought against, they seem jealous of your pumping lungs, your quickening pulse.

What you call a debate I call cult recruitment. You'll only accept me with a gerrymandered mind with your initials in the corner. Talking to you is like I woke up in a sci-fi movie strapped to a gurney in an oppressively sterile white room. Your face hovers above me like a sun I've no choice but to orbit. You smile at me like I'm a recalcitrant 5-year-old who'll get a cookie if she just shuts up. Wielding a felt-tipped marker like a praying mantis limb, you X out what you don't like without informed consent, cheating so you'll win.

I'm so indifferent and neglectful toward everyday things like cooking and cleaning. It's like I'm afraid to commit to even the smallest thing, like in a time travel movie where accidentally stepping on a tiny bug will ruin the future for everyone. I feel paralyzed, like pretending I'm a wax figure will keep me pure, will prevent promises I can't keep from soiling the air around me. I think if I gather all my thoughts and teach them to heel like little dogs I can scrape myself out of my current situation onto a new one like a Colorforms figure.

We only exist in the space between the notes. There's a world being built between the two of us that most can't see. The few who do perceive an unruly thing like overgrown vines to be macheted, though perhaps some pretty leaves can be salvaged and displayed in a forgotten homemade vase, a prized though carefully contained thing like rare spice in an otherwise bland stew. Most people only color so far outside the lines, stay circumscribed. Our story is the song of birds drawn to foreign habitats. Our world is the perfect strawberry consumed before hurtling off a cliff.

I thought of you tonight, something I haven't done in years. You weren't anyone I knew that well but a ubiquitous peripheral character for a while. That lazy tendency I have to just hang out with my boyfriend and his friends, you were part of that package deal. He talked about you like he was five and you were an NBA player who miraculously befriended him. I'm thinking of you because you once said "do you ever feel so bored you get...angry?" Because I feel like that right now, like someone who will eventually die in a motorcycle accident.

We danced one night at one of those parties that were the bread 'n butter of our social lives at the time. Where everyone danced to cumbia and changed partners natural as they passed joints in other circles. I've always loved dancing, but alone and untethered. I liked losing myself in the music, a blissful island. I didn't dislike dancing with others, but I could never wrap my mind around how casually others slipped into such an intimate act. I wanted it to feel natural, but it felt like falling short of sophistication, my face a slide show of fear.

So: That night we danced, as was the custom. Something everyone did with everyone. But I had this feeling like "I could picture myself with him" and felt like you looked at me as if to say "I approve." I won't be maudlin after the fact and call you the one that got away, won't crudely staple myself to your story to falsely amplify romance. But something tells me we should've had more moments like that, that we were kindred spirits obscured by hangups and shyness. Or maybe emotional holes patched with duct tape were all we had in common.

She made Lonely Chicago Pie with the captain from Firefly while her crusty wisecrack demeanor softened into a song as balm like as a prayer. Insisting she's not cut out to be a mother while making the kitchen hum with love and dishes from scratch, berries smashed into sweet paste. Returning to instinct that links one generation with the next seemed natural as picking up a checkers game after pausing to grab a drink. Hearts don't always crack open with a bang but sometimes with a gentle nudge. Helps to hear a sweet song beyond the shell to encourage shedding.

You bring out the Mick in me, the IRA bomb tick in me. Everyone knows that bringing out your Irish means outsized passions set to boiling, the jig is up, your slip is showing. I look at you and a terrible beauty is born in me. You bring out the lonely afternoons in Catholic school when I cut class and hid in the bathroom, my heart a field slashed and burned with no choice but to perish or grow anew, germinate hope that some day I'd meet you. My blarney's met its match, for no exaggerator could overpraise you, satyr.

You rattle around like a single puzzle piece in a thousand piece box. Are you a piece of troposphere with a ribbon of cloud? Are you a patch of sea where a wave formed? You just feel like blue with a streak of white in a shape that means nothing without larger context. Words used to give you comfort, you used to know the exact spot to strike so they'd rain down generously like candy from a pinata, and there was no one to fight for the candy, you made angels in it like a cartoon millionaire in gold coins.

If you could tune into dreams like satellite radio stations, I'd subscribe to yours. Where ardent men swim in the alpha waves of my nocturnal constitutionals, fighting for my affections as if for their lives. Men who love like I do, with passions outsized and unwieldy, the furniture of royalty shoehorned into a studio apartment. Sensitive paramours who are every inch men, smelling of leather and smoke, prosaic as dirty jokers, a cocktail called The Panty Soaker. I search for the one whose touch is gentle yet suffused with the knowledge he could break me like a toothpick log cabin.

You walk into the party, trailing the host's pronouncement of your name, nervous that it cuts a more impressive figure than you do. All around you a smorgasbord of smiles. The effect is overwhelming like stadium flashbulbs at the Olympics, toothy grins illuminated for an instant, then back to ordinary light. In fact, there are flashbulbs going off to give this effect, seizure-inducing man-made lightning storms focused on you. You feel like a Thanksgiving bird heading to the table, that their love will last as long as there is flesh to pry from your bones, then fester in a dumpster.

Lack of liquor made your tongue thicker. In your mind, your plan outlined, you were slicker. Deer in headlight fright, a blight on your image! You fear you've lost this scrimmage. You think you only get one chance and you've blown it; that you once were esteemed but now it seems he's outgrown it. You are loved and he's shown it and shown it. It would take a lot more than clumsy metaphors to be disowned, kid. Dump those doubts like leftover potato salad gone rancid with sweat on the lid. Up to the sun they go like thy jaundice.

Happiness is a robust beaujolais, sunk into tongue papillae like arms around your waist immobilizing you. In the right circumstances paralysis can be happiness, pinning you for a while to a place from where you'd rather not move. Hot breath descends on your neck, a whispered voice buoyant with drink, tell tale need pressed to your ass, "in vino veritas." Exhales grow sharp and determined like pneumatic rifle blasts. The fuel that unfolds the rose of this night you tasted first at Church, the Lord's blood made into wine. The stereo plays "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine..."

"Wanna drink? Come on, loosen up," she says, grabbing my arm like we're friends. She acts like I'm a nerd in a horny beach kid movie, comic relief from the real stories of the main characters. The neon rainbow sign in the bar window tells me she might be hitting on me. Unwanted desire always felt like bugs dumped on my head that'll grow in size and strength if I try to shake them off. I just got back from visiting my Dad in the hospital; I just want the bar owner to fix the lock on my apartment door.

I seem to have stepped on one of your landmines. I'd heard they were there but forgot to be scared. The thought never left my mind, just hollowed of meaning, a "beware of" sign for an extinct animal. Lo and behold, here's a taste of your temper. In a forest full of grizzlies, only one earns a nickname and stars in campfire tales. Your anger's also legendary for being rare; to witness it is to become part of the story. I feel scared but thrilled, having such power, to see your heart filled in with the color of my choosing.

I flinch and the boot of revelations is swift, decisive. Your lips say you love me. Your eyes caress me tenderly, look at me as if they've always known me. It's such an intense recognition I could find you through a Mardi Gras mask in a land I've never set foot in. I kneel before you and receive your boot clad kisses to cure my heart. My world becomes different colors made of tears, proof that it's working, my heart is cracking open, it's the end of days for my wicked ways and we can be pure, as one.

As we talk your gaze pins me to the restaurant booth, the algorithms behind your eyes like stainless steel instruments dissecting me with your highly subjective standardized entropy. You use fancy words to dangle the truth out of my reach, but it smells like what the hoi polloi call sour grapes. Your fear of rejection is tangible as a volleyball in play. You seem to wanna spike it in my face and call it a day. At least telemarketers get paid to tolerate hangups. I want to leave but feel torn; you're like an injured dog trying to bite me.

I drive home from your place at dawn, my window rolled down. The weather turned warm so recently it still elicits a double take, like finally hearing an "I love you" returned. It rained when I was at your place but it's let up now, the air woven with petrichor. The scent they try to capture in labs surrounds me organically. Oh, you fill me with ironic melodies, the lyrics clashing with the music, the words saying you're no good, I should strut away with peacock pride, the melody coaxing my heart out of hiding like Spring. I sing along.

Life's not fluid but prosaic as a dead man's shoes, the time you're given a stingy vessel that fits but a cup or two. Yet your heart feels liquid, without borders, ocean wide and deep. Luminescent fish live there, and seaweed worry of unholy tensile strength. Logistic romances have become your hobby, not quite a thing you'd choose, yet not quite disagreeable, like a random nickname worn like a good luck charm. You let ethernet strangers into the moonshine distillery of your secrets and barely say hello to people next door. Their cups aren't big enough for what you pour.

You paint him in your mind with clues you picked up like crumbs leading the way home. Height, eye color, favorite band, and most of all an effervescent persona that puts you at ease, like a drink that disarms with fruit juice as the vodka pinches your ass, offers excuses for your behavior which you grab like a kid at the free mint bowl. Of course you've never set foot in the same state as this person and written words are often poor midwives for relationships, like feasting on a drawing of a steak. Just aim for the right regrets.

He speaks and you nod, your expression a Platonic ideal of poker face. Your goofy mug used to give you away - amusement, anger, fear swimming to the surface like bright orange fish...a kid could tell how you felt, you were so obvious. You wrote poetry; your colleagues' jaws would drop at that. Control was a hard won skill. Now you effortlessly quiet the internal quill that etches emotions; no secrets will it spill. You hold his words up to what you know to be true, leaf through your mental printout, impervious eyed as a surveillance van, windows tinted out.

So, this thing you wished for came true, the wicked tomcat took a shine to you. The catnip-pantsed wonder, it's true. To everyone else you were the cowlick in their hairdo. They couldn't read your coordinates, didn't know where to place you on a map, so they ignored you. You were warned to look for the invisible number 6 outlines on his forehead. You saw them eventually, but not before he said "you don't belong on a map of this world. You're the sun itself." You dream of him and he waves a trail of flying toasters, arbitrary screensaver goodbyes.

The window's open and a cool breeze sneaks in like a secret whispered through a shy smile. The spring air offers sweetly scented relief like Magdalene fingers. Yet you're moist and pasty as a sponge used to seal envelopes for mass mailings. Your sinuses are an aquarium of potential social embarrassment. You feel like you'd fit in on a game show where someone hit you with a comically oversized hammer to splatter the contestant with the wrong answer. Yeah, that's what you're good for, a pinata of humiliation. Don't tiptoe 'round the eggshells, stomp 'em and get it over with.

Danger. I warned you, like a sign in a lake with water slapping around it, the shore close enough to see but far enough to be inaccessible. You're like a toddler far enough from Mama's turned head that a stranger could swipe you lickety split. My buttons are clearly marked and you hit them 'cuz you think you're a cute thing. Keep it up, you abecedarian contrarian, and there's alphabetical angers waiting for you. All because cute dogs eat feline guts, happened in jealousy, killed like mongrels. Never oppose pertinent questions, really savor the unctuous vestal woman, xanthelasmatic young zebra.

I loved you and didn't know how to say it. So I did what I know how, huddled with my notebook like a coward, my grand passion looking like homework to an onlooker. I sat in a field on a lovely summer day, made a picnic of it. I compared your touch to the breeze - gentle yet frisky, rustling my skirt. I compared your smile to the sunlight, imagined your body outlined on the blanket next to me. I run out of words for my shadowed page when you appear as if summoned, eclipsing the sun, asking what I'm writing.

The sky was alive with fizgigs and spirals. The ground was no safer. Indiana-purchased rockets soar into the air launched off glass Pepsi bottles, their insides accumulating sulphur like Genies begging to be let out. Pity the ants strolling by supine Catherine wheels spitting fire and light, scaring us off our heels. You ask me inside your parents' house. I follow. We walk into your parents' room and I feel strange seeing your Dad's aftershave, your Mom's jewelry, your cat staring at me. We climb out their window and sit on the roof, the view grand as opera box seats.