Just a chipper little limerick.

After the Carnival

And we’re home again,
beer on our breaths
as we laugh
like two balloons colouring sky.

Before our bathroom mirror
you floss out the skins of
kettle corn
while I glide your butter shoulders
and the bumps of your spine.
The thread falls, forgotten
as our slackened lips take on a driving unison.

I touch your tender belly,
pale where the trail of whispering hairs
slides beneath the waistband.
Blind fingers skim a lesion
bright as a clown’s nose—

and sudden all sudden this stupid fright
my coward hand snapping back the words
i’m sorry i’m sorry that was dumb i’m sorry i’m so so
with the instant hot where my fumbling guilt the
rapid horror of your fire skin an ugly word and

That look on your face.

Slow again. We crumple
in some scary desperate shaking.

But after the crime, impossibly,
your miraculous hand
sinks into mine.

You tell me how small we are
and younger than all of this.

Now I spill my silly fountain wish:
To pierce your navel
with the stick of my cotton candy
and drain that grim pollution,
to dab your smothering reds
with two ticket stubs.

My hopes in dimes and water.

(You would have looked beautiful all hunched and grey, you know.)

Instead. Instead, our early sobs resonate
on porcelain, ceramic, the white
and cold tiles of this echo chamber.
Here, our need announces itself
like singing horns
and the shameless roar of the midway.