Still a child in many ways, you’re orange, counting down the days

like seven high rise buildings. You’re kissing churches, windows, walls,

watching three caught in honest embrace, beaming face, call it pride.

It pulls the corners of their lips towards a slovenly sun.

 

February taunts us with its sweet brevity, hounding us with showers

and a gust that touches every heart in pointed pricks. We perform

in ripe collections of colours, tracing cobblestones like thin paper,

thin glances. Screams develop like little broken pools.

 

Won’t you tell me to be truth’s fool, an order that’s iced and raw,

trickling down like sundried spirals, calling to tomorrow’s jealousies?

Could we clasp each other tightly as we stare down this man-made rain?

A thousand frozen pasts singing on a note of grief.

 

However I phrase this love and pride, they will remain brothers, men

bound by memory, underscored by a week’s entertainment, a new

obsession leant to me by rogued hands and rosy cheeks connected.

Perhaps a whisper I’ll never attune to.

 

But now let me return to joy cascading in sheaths of stretched laughter,

discard those six years, for their worn-out soles won’t bring me forward.

I join you now in your precious spring, lie in those brilliant emerald blades,

reach out for you now as you lift from me and glisten.