Rarity

Her neck was cold that day
and the moment that I kissed it
her whole essence morphed into
a tunnel right in front of me.

It was the kind of tunnel with a paved road
and lights along it’s corners
you would drive through
on your way into a city.

After absorbing the miracle
in the orange park I started
jogging down the road
that lead inside it.

It was normal at first
just the average things
you’d see in others made by man,
but after a while
there were obvious departures.

Glass chandeliers began to appear
after about a quarter mile
and they brought with them
a ringing like a metal fork
on porcelain.

Then there were flatscreen T.V.s
all projecting the same program
of a choir in white robes
in some cathedral
I could never have identified.

When they sang
water would pour down all the walls
into storm drains
spaced out evenly along
the edges of the road,
and I took occasional drinks
by cupping my hands tightly.

I took breaks and smoked
the pot I brought
to share with her while we
continued with our date,
but I was nervous now
and needed it.
While being careful to
keep track of both directions.

I kept going on for hours
while the walls all warped
like ocean waves and the ringing
became voices saying nonsense
not pertaining to most anything.

At a certain point I found a couple rabbits
sleeping peacefully on a pile
of newspaper and became hungrier
than I ever had before then.

I killed them without trying,
with only my two hands,
and I got both of them
before they could have ran.

I held them by their ears,
and cooked them skinned
over the burning newspaper
without even bothering
to check the pointless headlines.

The only thing I remember
is a black and white picture
of a bleeding mouth
slowly wrinkling away in all the heat.

I didn’t wipe the blood from my face
and continued on for months like that.
Finding more rabbits and more newspaper
with my lighter never running out of wick,
and I forgot where I was going
or how I wound up there in the first place,
but I could picture her and that kept me
connected.

After some years when my hair
was past my shoulders
and my beard was to my knees
and all my clothes had long unraveled
off my body, I reached the end.

The far mouth of the tunnel came out in the middle of a cliff above a raging ocean
cold enough to kill.

I just sat there for a week while the winds
sent my hair all over, and I bit off the heads
of seagulls that would land by me
believing I was too still to be anything alive.

After a long time I heard the heartbeat
of a motor back behind me and I turned to see
a headlight heading toward me.
It was her on a beat up red motorcycle
and the same clothes she was wearing
when I met her.

She slid the bike to a stop
and looked me over head to toe
before rolling her eyes
and nodding for me to join her.
I climbed on behind her
and grabbed her waist
with all my strength, then drifted off
while watching all the lights blur.

It was a long time before I woke up
and almost every dream
seemed less real than the last.

When I did open my eyes again
it was just her and I
alone there in the grass,
back where we started,
somehow sensing we had
known each other longer
than could ever have been
possible.