Super Hero

by my good friend David Scott (if any of you have connections with folks who publish, please get at me, this dude needs to be published!)

At this hour, the blinking stop-lights mirage red carpet and the homeless and the junk are just flickers. It figures because I can't help feeling that everything with you could've been perfect; that we could've worn these streets like houseshoes, once. up to the thousand rooftops where we pulled eachother to bed every night; hung an attic in the moon's waxing to keep-safe our favorite kisses and when full we would remember all the corners that brought us to these heights.

But in the days since I forgot how to fly, the only lights are the question marks of lampposts: Why am I anywhere with them when I could still be with you?

Do you remember when I told you:

To look past the streetlamps and read how the twilight calls you darling with its sparkle

To open the thousand doors of your face to me and let the stories behind them pour out and run to my eyes like the wounded light from a murdered star

So that in the summers where they fall you can see that they are us

that long ago we pushed these chests out dry and sea-thirsty like lonely shores and matchboxes and when fingers struck we felt flames before we ever saw them That nothing has said "You Are and You are Full of Fire" like the stroke of the Index finger our touch has been censored in these empires of sandcastle

where we are the sandmen and sandwomen held prisoner by our own Dreaming so grasp me grenade-like and swing these napalms against the walls between ourselves and the Seven Billion Pieces of God

and we did

And when I was inside of you the buildings fell from the city like fruit slipped free of its peel, and out of the disaster people everywhere bulleted through offices and the capitols like a rebellion of bottled fireflies.

we snapped the workweek's back between our grinding teeth

until we could take no more and came in war chants that shook Air Force One out of the sky like a daydreaming child, rocked the entire NAVY into seasickness with the way our lower bellies made the oceans boil.

and when we gently clothed eachother afterwards

the mobs fell upon the police until all that was left was the wheeze of sirens drowning under a buzzing of stars returning to the sky

and they called our romance terrorism, as we walked stumbling and lovedrunk into true night, and bent its road past madness until we saw the sunrise of its good sense to a clearing where we had children who had everything and knew of Ronald Reagan only as a crucified villain to a long bedtime story

I want you to remember how no one did a thing, could do a thing, could dream of doing a thing, because I was invincible when I was with you.

So please know that even when my bones become separated by time and its haunts Holes in the wooden floores of me a spooky house, a dusty woodwind you will stir me still when I remember you My wet eyelashes will xylphone your melody perfect the kiss of molotov to your touch and the way you walked, the same way we made love like this world hadn't broken into our hips much too early for us to be this proud of our bodies.

I miss wearing the scarf you made. Even though it wasn't really comfortable. But it was my cape and costume. And I miss the feeling of flying when we danced on rooftops to no music and the brief moments of teleptahy where we held hands and knew what the other was thinking.

I miss having the unbelievable strength to lift the laughter out of you even during the nights where you mistook me for you shadow and fought me for trying to hold on. But these days I have only these arms, and these hands, pretty odinary. So I'm writing you this.

Because the other day when I saw you, it was all wrong. The clouds had rolled in like laughter, and the buildings and the satellites had us hemmed in like linebackers, as if they were daring us to do something about it. As if they didn't know that we used to be superheroes.