The heart's beating slowly

Like the soft streetlight in the warm drizzle.

It doesn't feel cold here, not now, at least.

The bricks are raw brown;

The window glass's gettin' washed now and then.

I miss my favorite cardigan Granny knitted

nine years back on such an evening.

The sky's burnt orange—a tinge of December blue.

I miss the night sky we promised upon:

"Never to leave each other"—

It's gone, so long gone—

into the absurd olive forests, into the crack of her lips

Where poetry spills out from, bleeding red and blue.

The drizzle smells of euphoria, a dizziness

To look back and sit for a while

In the black warmth of rustling memories.

I miss the smoke of a cigarette

That used to fill our basement every night.

The brushing fingers that had once promised

and now broken hearts.

Granny's voice doesn't wake me up anymore

For she's the winter sunlight that plays hide-and-seek on the porch.

Our room doesn't call me to spend time near the crooked window pane;

Your blue shirts don't smell the same.

Our days now smell of butter and cotton—

not like they were, not like us.

For there lied this crooked love,

Flowing like water through the cracks of rocks;

Gushing out like rain-soaked dreams, yet locked.

We locked it in glass jars and kept it away from the sunlight.

They're now burning caresses

on this poetry-filled foggy evening:

Bleeding through your ocean eyes,

Breathing green from your pink palms,

Humming the foggy dreams from your dry lips—

Out of this reverie—to hold things back and never move on.

You finished your fourth cigarette and vanished into the winter fog.

The streetlight is glowing softly

in lost nicotine love.

I wish memories could walk over here—

lilac letters, burnt blue youth,

liquor-washed poetry, maddening silence.

It's December drizzle in the old city, and I'm missing all of them again.