To be a tiny snake in an enormous blossom.
Think of it as thick, pink, complicated.
The sensation is from the wind
when there is no wind (running

into you but saying nothing, observing
from enough distance that I’m hidden, invisible).

Delicious, your shoulders
slanting like some cliff I’m hanging from
in the cartoon of my life as I stand in the parking lot
and you emerge into sun
to stretch, a pencil in your hand.

Your beard edges your jaw
like frost or frosting. I stare like a hawk, can see
the holes in your shirt’s buttons and the thread

that holds them, can even see the needle
that glinted in and out of the holes.
Now I’m the snake, cool and curled
back into the flower, my skin smooth

but not as smooth as the impossibly many petals.
And I don’t feel
anything and everything I’m helpless
and evil and plotting.

The history of the world is starting over again
in me a mountain is being made
underneath the asphalt I stand on ridiculous
earth that can’t hold still that’s molten

and still supporting me watching you

wanting more than I have

just a snake smooth and disruptive

in a whorl of its own.