DAY 21: Morning Offerings

Morning Offerings

I always believed that girls
like you would never give
me the time of day.

The type with hips like
grandfather clock pendulums in slow motion.
Setting a room on stun, freezing time
and leaving fantasy in their wake,
eyes of men glazed over like
frosted glass watch faces.

So our lives revolved around
seconds of second glances
that would never add up to minutes of conversation.

But then they did.

I told you how I was a morning person
and you said that you could sleep for hours,
sometimes into the afternoon.

I explained how sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written.
Hours of minutes with no agenda
except possibility.

And I wondered how you
could possibly sleep all day
and all of the potential moments that
were wasted buried under covers.

I decided that I would give you the gift of my mornings.
I heralded them in as we watched the sky lighten,
you slept on my shoulder
and we fit together like carefully carved cogs.

Watching you walk to your doorstep with dawn in your hair
I remembered how we said we made cameo in each other’s waking dreams
and knew that this must be potential
must be providence.

That night my fingers became sundial stopwatches
by candlelight tracing shrinking shadows
across your skin.

Morning daydreams were interrupted
by the sound of your bare feet
on my kitchen floor.

You wore my favorite button-down
and left over kisses like morning offerings.
Your skin still smelling of the oranges
I had traced along your lips, the curve of your neck.
I wanted to make memories of you synchronize with
the smell of citrus.

I wanted to give you my mornings.

If I were a magician,
I could somehow stretch those last days into weeks.
I could get you to hear the choir claps and halleluiahs
that chimed every time you looked at me.

But not even magic could saw in half,
dissect the moments we spent together enough
to make me believe that I had a rabbit’s foot dangling
from my chest,
the one you’d been waiting for,
disguised in the mornings on a mundane life.

I used to be a morning person
knowing that sunlight meant sheer potential
a day with a story waiting to be written,
hours of minutes with no agenda except possibility.

But mornings aren’t the same
without you in them,
and now I sleep through to afternoons.

As morning creeps across my bed.
I hope that it might find you there,
where you ought to be.

But it never does.

So seconds pass thinking of you
thoughts never manifesting as second chances,
unable to freeze time, and
waiting for you to bring back my mornings.

Waiting for you to give me back the time of day.