[Split]

I'm sorry, up front. As sure as this globe's neutral cerulean tint,
This isn't an aria for love. Not tragically-flawed unduly remiss,
it's all the thought from above fused in a sketch
as the sun drew me traveling fog upon illusory pitch...

Sixteen was my age. By the third or some-th date,
We quickly explained we'd 'just hang,'
and relaxed where the sand missed the lake.
With embarrassing shake, dropped a palm on her thigh.
I'd brought a (finely aged) water bottle of Skyy-
Alexa... paper-rocked harmonica eyes,
Rough radiant slate, with lineal faults of glassy azure-
and we talked 'just' to listen to the laughter of words...
the sun wasn't set, next to yellow-red rays in the pond.
I cut the inappropriate slang with a cough,
despite the enormous ration of shots.
In light of transportation-based costs,
we were just a walk from her home.
Falling in close, I thought of the pause of my touch,
and lovers and love is brushed as broad as dawn and the dusk.
I'd caught in her eyes. The light sway of a sigh,
this was one kind of way strangers say a good night.

In the winter, I stood in an unravelled apartment....
We'd met in the park over casual coffee, among the rabble of Harvard.
Caught up fast over scatter-brained grey matter reserves,
the growing pains college days can have on your nerves...
Her eyes were faded navy, spangled in a glowing granite explosion.
It was maybe the angle... or I'd forgotten the tint ages ago in synaptic erosion,
Friends see apology framed as a distance. A gap with width of an ocean,
falling in stasis- crawling haze like the flurries as the blizzard approaches.
In shallow, miserable focus I slipped in my coat- she adjusted my tie.
Wrapped in the black of midnight alone, I looked up and laughed in the cold
this is just a way strangers cuss their good nights.

Shaded by funeral parlor, we escaped the sound of "til death"
And her eyes were alive, defined with a new color again.
I never had noticed, everything changed in the suns many crests,
but nothing becomes something from which it doesn't begin.
For the sake of time... I kissed her as love might intend,
as sure as her eyes are as blue as summer day sky in decline,
I knew this is one way strangers delay their goodbyes.