I want to be the book that sleeps beside your bed,
the one you reach for when you cannot find the
backs of your eyes and paint with your own ink
to highlight the sentences that highlighted
something inside you.  The bent pages and
water damaged spine and the ring of brown
where your coffee mug couldn’t help but sit
when the skin on your fingers couldn’t handle
the heat any longer.
Let me be the tanlines you don’t know you have, from
where the sun reached in for a kiss but found fabric
or metal or shade instead.  The halo of lighter skin
that lives under your ring or the lines below your
toes that trace the days you wore flip flops instead.
Would you love me more if I was your favorite dress?
The one that came out on special occasions and made your
lips do that little pursed smirk during your last glance
for the last time in your last mirror on your way out the door.
The silent nod of approval that all things are in the right
place and tonight, yes tonight, you feel beautiful.
The one that drops jaws and raises eyebrows and forces
hearts to speed up when slowing down for the night was
all they had on their agenda.
I had a dream I was rainfall, but the kind that followed
you around and only fell in your hair.  The little cloud
that carried me was a magnet to the metal in your blood
and sticks to you through the comic strip course of your
afternoon.  The kind that rains under your umbrella as
if your umbrella alone created it.  Let me be that rain
as you splash and jump and play inside it, the feeling of it
soaking your socks and that gorgeous realization that
wet socks should drive you crazy but just cannot today, just
will not if it’s me that’s the water and your socks are
drinking me like they are dying of thirst.
I want to be the conversation that’s held entirely without
words but instead with the ballet of your lips on my lips.
The slight pauses and the long drawn out sighs.  The words
that translate themselves as we pull our mouths apart for
a moment just to memorize the exact smell and taste and
tactile imprints that we were left with.  The argument that
takes place under sheets instead of across tables, the
peaceful resolution that comes as I wash your hair in the
shower and see the letters of our disagreement whirlpool
themselves around the drain before vanishing forever.
The soap bubbles that pop all around us and each carry
the same sounds, if only we were small enough to hear,
Do they all say how silly we have been?  How small the
furniture in the household of that fight?  How crooked
the paintings and how sloped the walls of that argument?
I wonder what it would feel like to be anger, or sadness
or even regret inside you?  I would love to be any
emotion that you, without knowing why you do or even being
able to help the fact that it’s habit now, keep bottled up
deep inside you.  I want to know what it feels like to shake
you from your skeleton and rattle those bones and make
every freckle dance with how hard your skin shakes.  Then
I want to be the calm that washes over you and the
realization that you are exactly where you are supposed
to be and that no one, not any one, can ever take that
away as long as you believe in it.  I want to be the smell
of your childhood home and the reaction your body has when
something smells exactly like it.  That instant transportation
to somewhere simpler.  I want to be 5:00 am on Christmas
morning and the way that every other person in the family
yells at you to make it at least 7, come on, this year, at
least 7.  Maybe I could be a dog that followed you home
one day or looked at you with just the right combination
of love and need that made you stop your feet from shuffling
out the shelter door and turn on the spot you stood to
rescue me.  Maybe if I was a dog, on the day I died
all you would ever possibly remember were the good moments
and good things that I did and never the mistakes or the
times I broke things that shouldn’t be broken or acted
just a little too defensive and willing to show everyone
everywhere that you belonged to me, and I belonged to
you.  I want to be the sound, that sound I am sure every
person on every planet makes but no one will ever make
quite like you, when you stretch your body as far as it
will stretch in the morning.  That soft mix of moan
and squeal as you bend the sleep from your weary bones
and remind them that they were built for being vertical
no matter how much they love the feeling of lying down.
I wonder how it’d feel to be your favorite song? The one
that makes you stand to look for the hand that can only
land on the small of your back and spin you in slow circles
to the words you know by heart.  I want to be known by heart
like all the songs that act as soundtrack to all the
memories of all the things you’ve ever done.  I want to be
your first day of school when you were just a child, the
backpack that was bigger than you were and the school
supplies you shopped for weeks in advance after checking
the list and checking it again that was taped with too little
scotch tape on too big a window outside the hauntingly empty
parking lot that is a school in summer.  I want to be your
dreams, be they nighttime dreams that take you to places that
you have never been or put air between your feet and the
earth that you’re locked to or just simply let you sit around
a table that you and I built out of old wood we found
on slow walks through rainy fields.  I want to be the steam
that rises from two cups of tea while we sit at that table
and the way the light seems to play in it when it’s filtered
through the dirty windows still moist with the morning.  Or your
day dreams, for they are dreams too even though they always
get passed over for the silly fact that they lack the
qualifier of sleep to fuel them.  The daydreams where you stop,
mid-bite or mid-sentence or mid-morning and just stare into
nothing to fill it with so much something else.  I want to
be that something else and the way your pupils dilate when
you start leaving this place to spend a breath there.  Maybe
I could be piano keys so your fingertips could dance across me
and no matter how out of tune I found myself, you could still
find a way to make music.  I want to be a short winter filled
with long snows and a long spring filled with longer thunderstorms
and I want to be the goosebumps that crawl up the back of your
spine at the first bolt of lightning, the first crawling
boom of thunder and the way your eyes raise up big and bright
in tandem with a giant inhale when you hear it.  I want to be
a handwritten letter that you wrote to me, and I want to be
the letters that you carefully chose to put next to the
other letters and the way you worked hard to make the sentences
dance together.  I want to be your handwriting scrawled across
the pages and the bravery of choosing ink and not lead
so mistakes stayed mistakes and could not hide from my
reading eyes.  I want to be the word and more than the word
the promise of Yours, before you sign your name.  I want to
be that flourish of that pen and the way it connected to your skin
and that skin covered your blood that carried all the words
from your heart to your finger tips through that pen that your
fingers held too tightly and pressed too firmly into the paper
it wrote upon.  I want to be the pages under those pages that
still carry the indention of your thought process and I
want to be the part of the envelope you lick to seal up tight
all the things you could never say to me.  

-Tyler Knott Gregson-