Three sugars and two creams, he says, fatly, and no that’s not a typo. No relation at all but it reminds me of the Matt Dillon look-alike with the black-and-white bowling/leisure shirt who slammed a napkin down on the bar in front of the drunk girl at least a dozen years his junior and who was still probably too growed up for him when he was her age and that’s really saying something though I realize I’m not I’m just saying, the drunk girl who’d just a few minutes prior been sorority stripper dancing on her barstool with her two flock-mates, none of them spring chickens themselves anyway and all I can think is you. Just you. Not of. Just “you,” and how you know how I fight with words to fight with words and I fight with words to love with what’s between.

It’s clean as day, you said, an accidental misspoken saying you recognized but a half-sentence later and say by say we make our own said speech and let it sit down in our deep down realm of sounds, senses and sounds and arms around and I know you’ll always keep me clever, clean, in between—

keep me, no rocks, no hard places, no weights and drains, only runneth over spills and neverending fills, keep me like that day we walked slow till the rain came and that was us, first and forever and I thought my god we’re going nowhere and I thought that in the best way imaginable, I thought, forever in between, had and having, been and being, seen and seeing, possessed and possessing, going, and only gone together, loving with and through what’s between,

thinking now those belonging-type words used to be bad-connoted and ball-chain implied but it’s the grammar that makes it matter just like it’s you that makes it work where before it only went and happened

and I think in shorter thoughts and fewer words and more sounds how it is to belong, that it’s not a matter of means but a matter of is and how two letters can say it all no matter who wants to barstool drunk dance around us and four letters say it’s ours and four more that I’m _ _ _ _

and pointless stories no one wants or needs about three sugars and two creams on the same day, oddly, the same day you told me you’d deliberately oversweetened your coffee are for everything and nothing in between us but a few dozen handfuls of sunsets as the crow flies through it and it’s hard to even say that counts because more than anything in this world I belong, possessed, still me with all that’s still mine like all my in-between stories in between the things I create to tell you and longing, only longing, longing to be apart with you,

enough, I say, though, fighting, enough of this from.