Hide and Seek

We spent our younger years
Pondering the brutality of love,
Huffing the breath of darkness
Like gasoline fumes,
Basking in the sorrow of morning,
The song of eternity we spent dancing
Hopeless hapless helpless
Amongst shrunken heads
Twinkling in the sky.
The stars and rain formed a chorus,
Voices born before time,
And sang us soft to sleep.

We grew older. In the afternoons,
Rain ruined our favorite shoes,
Made our kisses sweeter,
Made the days longer,
The darkling nights we laid together,
Counting leaks in the ceiling,
Counting thunder clashes,
One. Two. Three. Four––boom.
God was getting closer now.
This was our hide and seek.
We hid from the world,
And the world hid from us

The darkness we didn’t care to see,
Dangers crawling like leaves
Along a sidewalk, scraping,
Hushed and low, ready
To sweep our toes from under us
And throw us to the dirt,
But we’d have none of that.
We were ancient now,
Wise enough to know the difference
In clouds, and clouds.
A storm was coming, true,
But you and I, we’d fare just fine.

And when night came at last,
We’d be sitting hand in hand,
Watching the horizon disappear,
Waiting for the clouds to find us,
And you’d look at me,
Hope in your eyes,
And we’d speak without speaking.
We wouldn’t need words,
Like love, or death, or thank you,
Because we’d have said them all before,
And when the rain started,
We’d hold hands and count, together.