Second-Hand smoke philosophy

(Inspired by Dakota Warrens’ “Philosophy Between Cotton Sheets”)

i. Your head rests firmly against my hollow chest. I still can’t seem to discard our memories of May. When the vines of naive affections still lay; an obstruction of the sun that speckled your skin in searingly sweet warmth, just enough that your burns didn’t blister, the damage still incomplete.

ii. Stare at one point in space until your eyes unfocus down your childhood street, whose name I never much liked on account of the fact it was the same as something I didn’t want to renew.

Not with him.

Never with you.

You’re still staring.

Can you see the space between?

Between the concrete and the air?

Between you and me.

The abstract place I carved away until my fingers bled, raw and curled in dismay, to rest our molding memories of May.

iii. You told me how you didn’t mind the vines, coiling round our grass stained calves and scratched up knees in the blossoming spring heat. But all you can seem to understand is the cracks in the concrete, your eyes bore into them, and I can see through the haze that all I’ll ever be is six feet deep, stinking with your second-hand smoke and my poorly phrased philosophies.

iv. I can still remember how I wrote my favourite words in scrawled blue ink on little scraps of paper I’d use as bookmarks. How you told me “that’s not how you’re supposed to spell salvation”.

I only shrugged, shoulders slumped low “It’s my way of spelling it I suppose”. As I wrote down futility on long faded scars. “You can’t count on me”. “You’ve got to run from this place please”. Words I wished I’d said but I’m still twelve years old with teeth bared and a pillow muffled scream reverberating in my skull, tissue and bone chewed through by parasitic deja vu.

Can you see it?

Can You?

You can’t see the between, you stared too long at the concrete.