beads like polished vertebrae swished against star white thighs,
clinking with microscopic mutterings that jigged along the base
of a particular skull perfect for listening to those ringings of hidden
sounds that the milkyway veins of her straining legs knew.
most brains couldn't hear the chemical songs of her skin.

he was a boy but he had a gun, so they called him a man
and gave him nothing else but a suit sewn of instinct
(wasn't machine washable, but he didn't know 'til it started to rust)
and a miniature bomb blast that started a fire beneath the trigger
finger of his gunslinger hands.

she turned his head, testosterone-eyes reaching with the heat of a match,
as the quartz cogs of his timpanic membrane ground a furious beat
with the humming near the blood-barnacled clouds of her rounded knees.
he was enraptured, but held like a scalpel on satin;
he was a blade and she was a sandstorm.
this boy had always preferred the mirrors to smoke.

they danced until he felt the moon on his back, (shoulders
bulging with imagined weight, for she saw the night's smiling face still
tucked into the sky) and when he took her hand,
she dragged midnight into the bed and wrapped it around her shoulders
because he stripped down the rest of her defenses with his own practiced hand.

when they woke the next day, sun had done away with pretty moon
and called it a pruning of unruly ribs that had a mind of their own,
but neither boy nor girl asked a celestial question, and it came as a shock
when he forgot the notes of rain on her arms and the words
to the thrumming of her epithelial layers.

he had another song stuck in his head.