Summer Jumper

Decidedly dedicated to Gabby and Bella,
Who will most likely find their fingerprints in this poem.

I shrug on jumpers
In the middle of July.

Pull them over my head.

My head 
Filled with words 
From pages
Lit by flickering candle flashlights
In the early mornings.

Pull them over my dinner stuffed brain
When cobwebs fill half the population’s heads,
And salt water fills the other half’s.

I slip on sweaters,
And listen to flip flops slap against the pavement
Like caught fish struggling for air
Whilst they’ve still got life left in them
To struggle. 

The sun is the sole actor on the stage:
The only one who keeps from getting burnt
Because he’s somehow gotten rid of all our shade,

And heat slips itself into my jumper
As if it belongs there,
As if it were you and your dandelion breath 
Somehow finding its way down my back. 

But the heat is warm,
Whilst your pick-up-stick fingers were cold.

No amount of lying to myself
Can change the truth.

You’d melted with the powder snow,
Wilted with the rose beds of the Spring,
Died as the robin’s whistly chirping waned.

We were never evergreen, 
But I had hoped 
We’d both be oak trees
Meant to grow tall,
Meant to touch the scattered light of the sky,
Meant to stretch our trunks wide into the summer,

But now,
I shrug on sweaters
To remember your seed
That never made it through the Spring.

Of course, 
You wouldn’t have—the mere idea
Of Summer dried you up 
Like a tomato left outside at noon
When the temperature could have easily sparked a forest fire.

I’d hoped we’d be a forest fire,
But you much prefer 
The biting cold of the winter
When we’d pick fallen pine cones 
And turn them over
Like Christmas trees
That had forgotten to light up. 

Like we
Who had simply 
Forgotten 
As well.