Luke Valmadrid

In keeping our wits about us

Your laugh echoes easily through canyon etches, a watercolor genius moving across an amateur’s sketches of self-portrait attempts (really, happy self-portrait failures that see more of you in every iteration), a theme that learned to love itself through loving its variations, and as the banter varies, your chestnut eyes gleam with coruscant abundance, as if ardent stars falling by their own power, a choice not made lightly, but with all the light they could muster, bursting with brilliance, luster, and amity, pulling me in with more magnetism than gravity, light hearts charged up with will, like a glass half-empty-but-fully-accepting kind of happy, a turn-the-other cheek-for-a-breathy-kiss kind of scrappy, and in this pugilistic way, the quips whiz, the jests and wisecracks pop their aluminum fizz, and my very, very real problems simply don’t have the time to wait for us to finish snickering.

Observatory, at Charter

The open bus stop seat bathes in mist and static, 

shimmering sweetly at the memory, crackling madly 

at what it still means.  

​

The setting sun bartends the final patron,  

too old to start again, too young to believe so, 

too truly still in love to feel how much time has passed. 

​

The lone traveler knows best that perambulation is best done in pairs,  that plans are simply pods for two peas who would otherwise be split

in every possible meaning of the word. 

​

At this intersection, I am still bravely weak enough to wait—

not for you to not let me down, not for you to make me happy,

but for you to just be right there.