Peanut Butter (a few days ago i dreamt of you. i woke up at 3:47 a.m. the morning after.)
in the kitchen i stumble into, i recount details
with words i’ll call repulsively sentimental if overheard
(-while keeping them burned into my chest like a heretic,
competing with the cool silver cross I wear there.
your description- holier than my god.)
i call the way the sun refracted off the water, illuminating your freckles, cinematic.
and i am not insecure in the way i think of spending the day in bed with you
(-i pull peanut butter out of the cabinet to make a sandwich as i do it.)
there is no danger in the thought of being preoccupied entirely with watching the luminance of
dawn play youthfully in the depths of your face as it spins itself around the corner of your
eyebrow and kisses your pupils before sliding down your cheekbones
(-why would I fear the devotion of a mirage,
a vision, with less material weight than the
dissatisfying stickiness on my tongue?)
my hip bumps the counter during my distracted withdrawal from the empty plate before me.
i kiss the cheeks of larkspurs wilting on the kitchen windowsill and say i love you
(-to the spent jar of jif before letting it sink to sleep in the trash.)
and i sink myself into bed at 4:24 a.m.
I dream of the shore,
(-and your laugh becomes just as new
as the jar of peanut butter
i find on the counter the next morning.)
I wrote Peanut Butter on a whim in deep winter. During this period of my life I had reoccurring dreams that woke me repeatedly in my sleep, and my resulting insomnia would have led you to believe I had been plagued with unbearable nightmares while the opposite was true. They were fantastical dreams, wonderful and wishful dreams involving someone I had come to love that had driven me to exhaustion. The unceasing fever that characterized my winter was the result of the person I loved being inaccessible, misguided, and isolated. But our growing separation was not anyone’s to take fault for; their struggle with mental illness was a personal one that was neither my place or within my capacity to cure. They were lost to myself and the rest of the world all the same, and thats the truth that at the time of this poem I feared I would never acknowledge. These lines represent an unconscious realization, a painful relinquish of memories from another life, and the unreasonable behavior of human attachment.
Find Valentin Espey-Davis on instagram @valentin.espey