From the stained plum color of wine written on your lips, I drank from three words you spoke into the intoxicated air between us. Cards had then laid like white freckles on the floor as my body ascended to the heavens, leaving all sense and truth behind the storm clouds of love you wielded. And staring into the face of then my own dreams, hovering above muted chaos, I abandoned my heart to your playing hand; a fool’s replacement to the red king of hearts you just discarded. I watched my crimson beating organ in your fingers, beside the ace of clubs and the queen of diamonds as if it were any other playing card too. But those three words still sung like birds who pilot the sky and I smiled. I think you did too, but liquor laced my vision and I thirsted for deception, swallowing all luring love for the first time in my life. Your hands subsequently slipped from me like those three words, slick with wine, fell from your tongue. Your fingers woven with mine departed from my grasp, pulling and pulling back towards yourself. And it was in that moment in which those three words careened themselves back into the intoxicated air between us, dangling from the tightrope you held with fear. In seconds, they burned like ice over a raging fire of regret, becoming nothing but smoke and mirrors as if they never existed and we were then stranded in silence. I drunkenly laughed, and I think you did too, taking a sip from hungering thirst within yourself to drown love, love, love into the hands of a drunken sailor. It wasn’t until the sun came up, that I had stepped foot off the seas you forced me to sail at the hands of your own drunken desire, prompting you to follow. But you gripped the wooden wheel of plum stains as if you’d sail off into the graveyard of disregard. As if you’d sail where the salt and the wind would dissolve our stains into scraps.
So I watched the horizon for months, searching the current and the clouds for that ship to sail in the sands of my own solitude. My lips turned cherry, and cardinal. They stained ruby and then deep rose by the finished flutes that flanked my figure. Yet it still wasn’t the plum that produced poems of promise across our lips. It wasn’t the wine that wrote of lucid love through the night. Then only months of those written stains of reds, across my pout colored the same as the desperate fire you lit to burn love, love, love branded into a biting ache inside me. My lips parted in the color of red that you held in your hands, discarding it into the pile of our cards lost to those words. Red wine. Red love. Red fire and hearts. Red playing cards with deception and drunken desire.
