train rails and pony tails

In the heat of a July day in May,

I empty my lungs as we slip out

Over dusty train tracks in the sky.

Fractured wooden planks posing as handrails

Seem to float up accidentally from the river below,

Ebbing and bobbing like nomadic mobile mazes

Coolly ducking our grazes

You with those magnetic gazes…

Walking and talking about heights and hair,

Islands and pride and people with stories of their own.

On a graffitied concrete slab testing my phobia

Our legs dangle over the edge now, heads rest on the hard surface,

All of it softened by this foreign fluttering inside me.

Habit begs me to be afraid, but I left my breath back on those tracks

And there’s a comfort to your company, a contentment in our closeness.

Sliding under the mighty jaw of the draw and into its mouth

You show me life in a decaying metal mountain,

Ornamented with lilacs, a painted steel tree

With branches as delicate as its trunk is strong.

My breath returns for an inhale only to be twice seized

By the scorched tongue of the bridge beneath me,

A false floor with more space than base.

Willing my wobbling legs not to give up now

Sweaty hands clench my mother’s vintage leather at my hip.

My guarded gaze glides cautiously Up,

Up into the throat of a tipped bridge,

Up to the soaring swing where those who seek adrenaline in asylum go to release amid the clouds.

For a moment I am brave enough to close my eyes,

And I fly on the blue backyard swingset of my childhood.

Your sudden reckless affection does not disrupt my flight

But instead elevates it,

Extends, excites and exhalts it,

And I’ve been floating for so long now

My feet can’t seem to touch the ground.

-1:08 am, 5.17., a restless mind writing.

6 thoughts on “train rails and pony tails”

Setting The Barre