in coffee city we borrowed heaven

[levity]

You're every person who's been kissed against the wall of a back alley, just outside the yellow circle of light from a streetlamp, when it's quiet and smelling of dusk.
You're the skittering of a football across an uneven sidewalk, ballet flats with combat soles and convenience stores at three-thirty in the morning when the world is on hold and there's nowhere else to buy food.
You're manhole covers stolen to feed starving younger siblings and leaking air-conditioners and the sort of song you belt out at the top of your lungs when there's no one there to hear. Your smile is two sips of water to the man dying of thirst and thirty cups to the waterboarded prisoner.
You're skin on skin on cold tile and a vision in school-issue clothes, and when your clavicle breaks you laugh at your own vampire jokes.
Darling, you're splatterpunk and gibberish spray-painted on concrete walls, Chinese garter played on broken glass. When I make a show out of stealing your things it means I want to take you out to dinner and watch you scam your way out of the bill. When I follow you across a street without looking both ways it means that this city is made of paper. When I prise your fingers from their joints and put them in my soup my only regret is that I don't have longer intestines.
You're rockstar tragedy and Shakespearean comedy and dancing on air, all sunlight and scaffold. The choice is: cut me down, or break my neck.