like a kiss

What if I just kissed you?
Threw caution to the wind like mist,
you took my breath away like being underwater does.
London peppers my shoulders like glitter
My rib cage gets bigger just to breathe more of you in,
and I’m dizzy from the way you smell in the moonlight.

Did I say too much when I stuck you to the roof of my mouth with chewing gum?
Giving the game away,
my eyes bigger than my stomach
and a heart somewhere in between
I stare at the shape your silhouette cut out of the night.

Oceans pool in the gaps between my fingers
As I swim to you;
take your face between my seaweed palms
and we could make waves out of one another.

The echoing freckling of words dropped into envelopes like ripples,
hands chancing a touch,
misheard promises down the phone between time zones
cling to my collarbones,
and I breathe you out again.

In a second it’s over,
as if it never really happened,
but rewound over and over again in the minds of these two poets,
and I wonder what you would taste like,
if I dared to plant myself on your skin like a kiss —

but I flicker off and on like a street light;
unsure and without enough electricity to strike you with a thunderbolt,
I shake the moment out of my hair
ever hesitant,
resonant,
radiant in the glow of what could have been;
like steam it fogs up the glass and I wipe it away, drawing your firefly eyes in the water.

Sweet silence chimes in my ears
and I make my peace with it,
my puckered mouth makes do by kissing only the air in between us.