a poem from the springtime

Orange

Our slipping eyes wet the light,
padding our steps and smearing orange.
our voices, shoots of froth
boiling at their roots in the flushed ground.

Smells of a burning dawn crackle
and trail in our thinning stream of pattering toes.

I like emptying our spaces,
even if they thicken as I spill into them.

I swallow our rolls of silence
and feel them clamber inside me from bone
to bone.
but my words keep crawling
up
and tangle in my hair,
knot in the blotches of rosy air that stain my scalp.

I cannot unlace myself as you all do.
I am still a dusky, hollow form,
still carved from our orange, empty spaces.