Brown-Blooded

Your lips on my neck,

A rose,

Soon give way to

Thorny stem.

It reminds me of

The time I was a dog

And fetched the stick so many times

I fell over, panting from exhaustion,

Nobody around to hand me a glass of

Cool water.

The chickens surrounded me curiously,

Perhaps thinking me dead.

That is not to say that I was unhappy

But that something was missing.

And, like one pea in a pod,

Something is still amiss.

Like garlic in the salt shaker,

The flavor of your tongue on mine is

So wrong and

So right

And I want our blood to mix

Even though mine is sometimes

Bright blue

And yours is

A sunny orange

And I am scared

We would both turn brown

Not because I am scared of or

Repulsed by brown,

But because I have been blue my whole life.

Brown is the Earth

The soil

The hair color of thirty-four percent of the people in the world

The color of my freckles.

How deep does color go?

Once in the bloodstream,

How much deeper can you get?

Nothing ever really touches

So is everything just a matter of

Density?

I could be in Wales

And you underwater

Or perhaps on the moon

Or dead

And my heart would not know the difference.

Though it still beats in my body

And on my body,

My now-brown blood flows

For the two of us.