this temperature or town

By Adam Gibson

this quiet land, these days at the ocean
nothing this year seems as it seems:
we smash bottles from the balcony
with the world shining towards December
and i have been awake for 18 hours
when i could just sleep like a cat.

she had been away so long,
through the asthma winds and daily grinds,
so when she presses her hands across my bed now
i don't keep track of time or distance and
her blue lips are pressed against the cold morning
and now she creeps upon the covers and kisses me
and i would continue to sleep broken in her thin arms for ages if she let me.

she is a girl who cannot cope with winter
or the struggle to remember to rug-up
but talks about the open fires on the beach
in the late nineteen nineties,
about full nights with dry days
and when someone jumped off the roof into the pool
and she reminds me of a life i have forgotten,
that there's sometimes beauty and heart in what you find
when you collapse with the heat of the sun.

i have the last letter she sent me from overseas
and this whole thing could lead to highway dreams and
i would dream my dreams for her,
a person who wasn't born for this
temperature or this town