My skin tastes like salt. I can still feel the ocean kissing me as I drift beneath it’s surface. It breathes in my veins, rocks my heart with the swell of the waves. I stare into your eyes and think of home, of those last few seconds of air pounding angrily at my chest, of watching the sunrise over the edge of the world.

You remind me of a splendid thing.

That’s all I care for.

Those simple, tragic moments when the sun is dying, when my hair is salt stained and drying in the twilight breeze, and this boat is lilting beneath my bare feet.

My thoughts are the tangles of art impressions, of pretty words and broken poetry scattered on pages and tossed away by a poet you have never and will never hear of.

I write these thoughts down because speaking them aloud never works, you’d only laugh. I breathe to life these simple moments, of textures and colors burning bright within me, molding my eyes in a way that I can never truly explain.

That you will never truly understand.

Not from the depths of my chest or the worn leather of my soles.

But you tell me that my writing is like the crash of waves in your heart, the sun upon your skin, the feel of a sea breeze against the tangles of your hair, the deadly smile of a wild thing peering through golden boughs.

My tongue has whipped itself into a frenzy, scattering too many similes into the air between us, drifting like cobwebs in the night air.

You drift with them.

But I can’t stop.

These splendid things, these simple, lovely splendid things are like the thrill of seeing bioluminescence crashing beneath the prow of this shape, cascading out into the black waters around us like waves of glowing stardust.

Its a symphony of words in my chest, a burning hum I can’t contain in these fingertips. These feelings only come out when I’ve felt the wild laughter of freedom inside of my chest, tasted the lost blood of forgotten places on my lips.

I stutter-step in the darkness, waiting on a half-drawn breath just to see the glimmer in your eyes. You remind me of all of these things, of these splendid memories drawn in sand and left to the tide.

I have so many words tumbling from these fingertips that you have inspired in me. They taste like salt and sweat as they dribble on the page, a perfect symphony of color, shape and sound drifting in the silent blue of this room.

Words hold no sway on the beauty of this day, of the wild, rushing joy in my veins, but I can try to capture it, if just for you to see who I really am.