You(th)

Bella Mauro

(Photo Credit: Bella Mauro)

I light my last cigarette as I wait for You to come,

and exhale lazily towards the rose-

tinted sky. It’s these chilly evenings where starlight

creeps in slow and the air grows dense with smoke,

clinging to each atom around me. Today becomes a dream

from which sanity barely escapes.

The haze lingers but will not escape

Time. and when you finally come,

glassy-eyed and stumbling, I remember it’s not a dream.

You saunter over, cigarette in one hand, rose

in the other, and disrupt this mass of smoke,

your face emerging from growing starlit

skies. It’s not more than ten minutes before stars light

the sidewalk and gentle melodies escape

your lips. We bathe in the smoke

and cry out to the universe that this dream

roll onward; that time never comes

to chase us. Your hands rise

to my face, cheeks flush with pink rose

and I can already taste cheap beer escaping

your mouth. You find a way to come

out of your head and whisper words of star-

burned fantasy. And I think I must be dreaming,

or my lungs have filled up with smoke.

Sometimes my mind dreams

of lonely summers, simple lives clouded in smoke—

when we’d wait for night to come

and Our minds to blossom in starlight,

dancing around ideas of life unlived. You could never escape

an exile of reality. Before complexities arose,

before Brooklyn froze in the rearview, life lingered in prose,

unable to speak to anything. Anything outside of dreams

suspended in thick cigarette smoke.

Those words could never escape

pages of memories wrapped in starlight,

So we wait to come

back.

These days You come only in my dreams,

still unable to rise to the occasion, like smoke—

clinging to starlight that I can never escape.