Letters Under Your Feet

And I'm writing you handful of poetry that you pick up from the breakfast table and stuff in your back pocket

Not in neat folds but crumbled into creases that intend to stay, make their home haphazardly among words like deliberate semicolons with only half a mind to stop;

Like palms raised up to the lips but never daring to touch

Like furtive glances hidden behind sunglasses and bucket hats

I'm arranging words in pretty rhymes just to have something to do

You know how jittery I get with my hands are empty

And my mind a portable whirlpool in your morning coffee.

There is something about haphazardly that makes it more me but then

You've always preferred it the other way round

Each sound dripping in you and drained out of all my ghosts

It's exorcised words that taste like rock salt on your tongue 

That you swallow down with seawater and smile

Because you've tasted asphalt before

Rough and sun-baked it tastes like all things fallen and trodden over.