I once had a friend who talked about a tongue and how heavy it was, how inherently powerful

Mine works over these words that repeat and these phrases that counter the work of your own tongue

Mine stumbles, sobriety kissed goodbye with your vowels and your consonants and where did you even learn to do that?

That little trick with your voice and your lips and your eyes that all speak to me these soft little melodies, these patterns of decrescendo

My responding harmony is never as clever, always too staccato and always this crescendo that doesn’t balance the measure, but overpowers your dynamic so I draw back

I am intoxicated, but in myself, in your counterpart, I find the need to hear you bright and unmistakable

Because bones in my fingers work to write these words for you

Messages, mentions of how I am foreign, but it is your fault

Because these feelings in my body aren’t mine

I am lost in nights when your freedom spreads to my bedroom and afternoons when you come home before I remember where home is and mornings when you come in without asking, because you know the answer will always be yes, and I am asleep

I am laid in my bed, breathing the gentle oxygen that you steal for hobby

Benevolent being that you are, I never do find myself without that last breath that calls your name, my word for longing and necessity

I am merely displaying my rights as a visitor in this strange and vast land that is yours, in which I have no control

When you leave it, I am remained in a state of missing, of sameness, of fine, of how about yourself and thanks

I am foreign in my own home and heart that keeps beating to the time of that song that you sang to me in your car after school

But when you return home, it is my bedroom and my arms and my forehead on your shoulder and your hand in mine and where I go when I got there, because my eyes are brown, but your eyes are brown

It’s not a real argument, but that kiss when we make up tastes just that much more of peppermint and damn, is it sweet to be home

Where our eyes are fond, and there is no fake, and you are the greatest, and despite the watch on my windowsill and the fact that there are ten weeks left until the end– there is no rush.