“Driver Crashes into a Tree”

All he can feel is red.

Flames lick the walls of his heart’s dark pockets.
They race to his throat, consuming the air,
blooming in there, and then onward to the head,
pouring past thoughts like quicksand slipping
down the minute hand.

He never asked for sound to collapse in his mouth,
for the senseless barrier between foreign skins,
going without another’s touch for countless days,
and leaving behind salt deposits from brown eyes
which somehow look like oceans.

Music rains from his eyes. Kaleidoscopic emotion
as quicksilver as the color of stained glass
saturates his head along with a brood of words unsaid
that leave permanent scratches on old records
of the mind.

A few words would’ve changed his winter face
into cherry blossom cheeks, and eyes
like skies that speak, and rose petal lips that play,
in their silence, with the societal fallacy that being content
should garner contempt.

He stands on the handrail with dreams made of helicopters.
His eyes are smoke after a candle, fixed coldly
on the moonwake which shudders along the river below.
City lights reflect onto ocean eyes with a glow
as ephemeral as midnight.

Silence shivers with anticipation.

He wants to let the river consume time,
let the newspapers read something like,
“Driver Crashes into a Tree.
The driver is innocent.
The road must be guilty.”