"I am echoes of empty moments" by Christopher Fox Graham

I am echoes of empty moments
the days with you:
drunk-night glimmers
flashing into sober mornings
reminding what was when;

you are 200-proof moon-shine moonshine

the press of your sleeping hips

hangovering me

headaches of your smile

body aches of your kisses

AA means something else

and there are twelve-hundred steps

to recovery

I cannot piss your DNA out from my liver

it’s deeper than my bones

shotgunning kegstands of your arms around me

I want you, summer lemonade
sweet-and-sour kick in the teeth
burrowing corkscrew cavities into molars
your mint-julep biceps holding me down
your voice a gazebo piano ballad
earworming a melody the rest of me misharmonizes

this old body was too young in you

you, too old for the time we had

we charted inevitability
we lived the prequel of the now-that-must-be
we plotlined the time-travel TV movies
we echoed thunder before the lightning

and in the now-that-must-be,

20-20 foreshadowing hindsights foresight

I still get drunk you in the moonlight

shape constellations into us

dismiss the stars that don’t connect

as figments of imagination

we, too stubborn to let the heavens disappoint

outside this skin built of metal adamantium strong

unbreakable in the winter sun

but inside the boy still shimmers in your afterglow

someone I knew once

he shared my bones

hoped so hard for fate to fail

hoped so hard time was a hiccup

we could reshape in our image

but without étui, the bedsheets of time

only fold now to then

never make now then

inside, he’s running away with you

flying elsewhere on someone else’s wings

but cannot escape this unventilated skin

he’ll suffocate in

rather than breathe new air

I’m supposed to be stronger than this
stoically accept your absence as a must-be

pass on the days without tears

get over you as all things do

fish-in-the-sea-ing our moments into someone else

less shimmeringly iridescent

but I can’t

I don’t know how

and I have no one to tell,

so your DNA leaks out of my liver

cirrhosising me to death

no one sees the lesions
covering this skin in a new armor
fresh-milk skin in each dawn
stitched together with dried salt threads

because you slipped in under the skin

some night when we shared the same bedroom air

fermented in our sweet sweat and whispers –

in dreams, all my stalwartness comes for naught

I cannot bleed you from my blood

you pump my broken-glass heart into synapses

irresistant when I sleep

reconstituting you back into being nightly

resever these heels so I can’t outrun you
torment me, tied to a kitchen chair

from these lips, draw some hallelujah,

which sounds more like your name

than any heavenly hymn

or late-night radio replay on backcountry roads

tonight as the sun sets and overweight lids heavyize
no volume of drink or caffeine

can keep me from you

or you 
out of me

it’s why I fight sleep so desperately
whatever war I wage in daylight

your irredentist reconquest reseizes in moonlight

paradoxing our ontology

make this heart ache again
bodyslam my mind against my skull again

this is the only real I feel most days

and agony bests absence

because it means there’s still someone here

you

or me 

or someone in between

even if it’s just a boy’s death throes

memories

bleeding out

Christopher Fox Graham © 2017