It's been too long since I've written haiku

the smell of the night
makes me want to run until
I can't get back home

--

you are embarrassed
and I'm just amusing, so
why try to hide it?

--

funny how sleeping
makes everything go numb
and fade to fiction

--

it's an eraser
or an ice storm, blurring to
surreality

--

I'm fading, aching
leaning, with lights flickering
I sink into you

--

I miss your music
even though now it only
makes me all empty

--

exhaustion, you see
is the most addictive type
of psychotropic

This is obsolete

We are floating on a picnic table in the sky beneath a harlequin moon. We drift out over the edge of the precipice, singing, laughing, mendaciously carefree. Every smile condenses a little more-- the moon is twitching, leering down from the clouds, the silhouettes of sedentary ghouls. The trees are melting as the air begins to hum, sounds dripping past hearing, into pure feeling. I stave off jealousy with denial, but you are phosphorous. The night is vibrating as I pull you ever closer, eyes shut tight against your plurality, against nothing wrong, against everyone else. I hide truths in lines of ruby down my back, absorbing, mending, darning all the loose threads in the stories I tell you with a lunar grin. The sky ripples disconcertingly as the crew of our picnic table/boat/zeppelin shifts uneasily. A lion roars through the reeds and I shiver with wanting, with waiting, with never-having. I steel myself to take what I can, give nothing back, and smile like the moon.

This is old

She stalks ever nearer, raindrop footsteps on the soaking grass, shadowdancing, cloyingly coy, unreachable but never quite unsensible. Her taunting tainting eyelids, dark with laughing, shining with flirtatious sidestepping, hide nothing; I don't need to see your eyes to know I'm being played with. Roadmap toes caressing the mud, she waits to run. I tie on my blindfold and give chase.