And so we started out: no show, no pretense, no love. Only desire.
(We would laugh. Who needs? Who needs anyone?)
You tasted like cheap wine and peppermint chapstick,
sweet and sharp on my tongue.

You were hungry all the time- I was nice enough to say I didn't know why.
We sat outside at night, there in that tiny Italian café,
shared a noodle, giggling, like we were Lady and the Tramp.
I don't fool myself with such illusions: we are tramps, the both of us.

I never found out your middle name, or your birthday,
or where you had lived before the city- little things,
little things that all the normal people knew.
But the normal people were in love, and you and I-
we were just desperate. We were just hanging on.

We drank bubbly champagne from corner-stores,
discovering that we were the giggling, stumbling drunks,
you and I: when we kissed I could feel the bubbles,
lingering in our mouths, popping and refusing to die.

We rode the subway for entertainment late at night,
too poor to manage anything else.
We mocked the woman's mechanical intercom voice,
receiving annoyed glares from our fellow weary passengers.
We laughed right back at them, as decrepit old stations passed by,
laughed long and loud and at everything.

And it's something like four in the morning when I wake up:
the motel's streetlights break in through a crack in the window,
yellow and sad and dusty, pulling all our sins out of shadows
so everyone can see us, scorning like a spectator show.

I can feel your heartbeat beneath me,
separated from mine by only skin and bones.
I breath in- you smell like smoke and turpentine.
A thought grabs me suddenly, twisting my stomach
and widening my eyes: I need you.
Oh, god, I need you.