Play, Pause, Replay

blue birthday bliss

Sleeptalking, cursing his name out loud,

spelling the pain in the arc of your scar. 

And we weep, over the dead orchids on your birthday.

The withered shades of azure bleed in the sky.

You trace along the crescent moons across my skin,

but you don't ask me anything about them.

Instead, you kiss the freckles across my

collarbone as I shudder in the afternoon haze.

We planted a cherry tree on your thirtieth birthday.

Like another day, March fifteenth passed

away in a blur, like one of your cigarette smoke tendrils.

His name forms the shape of your maroon

lips; the stolen kiss under the oak tree, and how

you ran away and hid in the corner of the sunlit room.

Our mundane love fades away in the burst

of the red sky. The shades of blue have replaced

the greys across your eyes.

A lonely conversation remains unfinished

over your favorite chamomile tea.

It was another Saturday, and we celebrated your

birthday by putting candles on a croissant. 

Sunflowers cry over the street blues, 

and how the shape of his name deepens

the growing crescent moon across the inside of

my thigh. Your fingers don't trace it.

Rather, they tattoo a stencil of the broken sun

in the dim city lights.

Cinnamon flesh rots in the burnt afterglow

of your birthday. 

He stands in front of you, with your favorite cake,

and wishes you a happy birthday, but instead 

it crumbles into the paper-thin walls like another

stencil tattooed across your shoulder. 

There's a mirror image of the blue birthday bliss.

We devour our pain when the broken sun 

burns our skins, melting them away.

So I draw an echo of another crescent moon until the

ache dies in the silence of our bliss.