Summer S(lips)

I. the kiss

You must have despised the thought of two boys kissing, but deep down you know it's what you want. And he, who you deny has a love within you, forgets about you, which you despise too—a worse feeling. Then you grow up without the kiss. But the boy lives in the air of your midnight, rotting in your heart and engraving avidly in the back of your mind. The lips that should have touched his, the lips that speak of never kissing, are whatever longs for the love that has been forgotten and shall be missed forever.

And when moonlight misses the morning sky in each of your wonders, a solace from a stranger by the wind will whisper warmth, and your scream will sound like sigh… begging it to stay.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

II. twenty something 

At the peak of August, the gray clouds sense of you spinning on your head and raining; they put you up to yawn and then fall asleep. And by September, when pink skies are like dancing ballerinas, I'll pirouette all over you and sprinkle you with the tenderness of a good dream, even your sleep desires.

my boredom's haunted

recalling things we never did

allegorically painted

by the voices of my head

stacking chairs, folding blankets

playing dice like little kids

now—now we're twenty something

i dreamt in creed and yours i greed

Swifted by the time, I left town. You remained still, stayed. Although my love lasted, it ricocheted, so it did. The two of us, in paths we haven't taken before, in the same heavens of the cold days of fall; sleep and dream, with our hearts' bruises of grays and pinks. We fragmentarily vanished to each other.

____________________________________________________________________________________________

III. coffee-like tryst

“

forty years later

or five minutes passed

i still taste the ember

of light that didn't last.

promise of bewildered

solipsism made of tears

your candle and our paper town

one match—it disappears.

feathered self-abnegation

i hate your “i want you here”

‘catastrophic eunoia’

is every almost of every real.

forty years before this

or five minutes ago

i'd make you a coffee

taste like kiss only us would've known.

in every august passed by,

and september leaves dry,

this poem will be your coffee-like tryst

until your lips miss the undone kiss.

”

Article: Renz Gerald T. Romualdez

Illustration: Alyzza Marie Sales