Daydream

I was four years old

And I drew the same

Flowers every day. Citric

Green. Magenta

For the petals, which

Was meant to smell like raspberry.

In college, I dreamed those colors

Swirled a spiral sphere,

They were lights in a parking lot

Separated by

A cardboard partition.

I felt a longing, as if

I was alone but

In the end love would win and

I would finally have enough.

I was 25. I stepped into a shop

That was clear and clean and nervous

Hands, I told a man to tattoo the shape on

My wrist.

Heady, deep magenta.

A creative force, my voice when I sing,

The ambience of sounds, the power to love

These stories, a bright girlishness of power.

And then green.

Wild and barely restrained

By thinking things,

In my arms for a drenching moment to

Give in.

Ceder branches and early June fields,

Dew dropped and they hold me even

When

I have nothing to give.

The tattoo didn't heal right.

A coworker's four year old

Was falling asleep and she picked

At the magenta on my arm.

I let her.

The artist had gone too deep on the green,

And it bruised, when the bruise healed,

The ink bled out.

It looked like a shadow of a vein.

I've heard no one can tell.

My love was scarred for giving

Too much anyway and my spirit has sunk too deep into

My skin and bleeds, and

If I gave my spirit up to the waking world

For every mistake I still never

Felt. Anything. As lovely

Ordinary, broken

And peaceful as

The way you move today

Through our spiraled home and the

Longing, childish, apple and raspberry lights

Of our bones.