I'm Sentimental

I'm Sentimental 

as Hell 

so I still cache that memory

of watching you sip

coffee, or, off the pouted glass tio,

Pabst Blue Ribbon, how the touch of it

to your lips was what I thought

kissing you would taste like

the salt of the bottom lip held

the seal or hoped it would

never leak, or the way

the top hovered

like a guitar string strum or the breast

of a bird, a dove you sung to 

or any of the other coaxed

to be roasted

to a temple god, the smoke

going up, the wing

folding over the open

then the closed, mmmmm, I got it, eye.

I like to think teeth

were not involved at all

that clink on the glass

was the ring you’d take off

because the jaw could be

trouble for the both of us,

a concussion we might later

panic dreaming of. 

I wanted it all

to be soft and slow

I wanted the touch

of your mouth, the skin

of your lips and tongue

to never know rushing, to,

if it were possible, resist

swallowing us

just for as long as it took

for coffee to cool or booze unfoam

and the breath of it alone

to be an invisible smoke any god

this god would lean into,

awed.  Is still wanting this

the same as caching?

of coming up to a place I’d thought

I’d lost my way to a long time ago

when you left that time

for good and I never saw

you again?  But somehow I saw

you, well not you, but you

enough to write you

here, to rub something

of you into my thought

long enough for it to roll in 

some kind of smoke.  I watch

a ways back so I won’t let

what it was I thought we had

burn to too much choke.  I’d

regret that.  I’m sentimental

as hell.  It’s hot sometimes.
and I can't breath.  And, sometimes

well, like now, it’s not.