[What the stars tossed, salt-casual, onto the not-black of the not-night suggest could be love, but I can't read them.]

This is not a love poem,
                       not-love, a not-love poem.

Falling waist deep into February
            stomping the signatures of lost years
            in footprints on the pristine present-
            this, not-night has become electric
            with memories smashing through
            the thin ice of teenage alchemy,
                   charged, with the possibility of
                                 heartache,
                                           frostbite,
            or even                         a complete skeleton
                                                   of our separate childhoods
                                                   frozen underneath.
            we, are the miners of nostalgia, now.

But in this not-night,
                    flushed
            with the subtle city lights,
                                                         out here,
                    where our separate homes used to stand,
                                         before the shame of
                                         trailer trash, or
                                         sunken lives
                                         or broken glass,
             we used to play.

(this is not a love poem, not-love, this is not how love works in the movies)
                    somehow, when I was dragging you
                     back, across the white field
                     of, NOW, the snowy sleeping hills of
                     our newborn responsibility,
                            birthed backwards, breeching into
                            wide streets and big houses,
      I fell.

Not, with a boom, or a crash,
         or a crunch, or a scream,
                                                      but a splash-
         into the rich dark mud of our
                 trailer park pasts,
         and your laugh is shaming the
                  careful silence of this not-night,
                  and the muck that has sucked me back
              into childhood                      engulfs
                                                              the not-black in the smell
                                                                                        of old bones
                                                                                        and sleeping roots.
                
We two,
               splattered elbow deep and sopping thick,
                                  are     learning    love
                in spite of
        the February cold,
                in spite
         of your fears
         and my mistakes,
                 in spite of
         the not-night
         and the mud-soaked snow.

                         I drove us here,
                                            but you let me wear your coat.