Archive-name: Poetry/450-word.txt
Archive-author: Major Tom Boutell
Archive-title: 450 Words


A child's voice on the radio.  Smooth blue glass in the sand.
Songs full of birds.  A touch of darkness that cannot be seen.
An answering touch of living fingers.  Christopher lies
dreaming.  His dream is spelled out in crystal blue letters
that hang like ornaments in the wet sky.

He stands in the limitless grass, a walking stick in his
right hand.  His chest is a mirror, a mirror for both sight and
touch.  His eyes become the things they see.

She stands in the middle distance, a rainbow between her hands.
She wears no shoes.  Her feet touch the ground.  Her feet move
softly in the ground.   

He sees, he becomes, her feet, feels the earth upon them, feels
the earth between them.  He removes his shoes, and they vanish
like a lifting fog.  His feet touch the ground.

She smiles and steps toward him, and the tiny bluebells in
the grass shiver with every step she takes.  She removes her
blouse, and watches, laughing, as it crumbles into the grass.

He sees it go, and feels the warm sun on her breasts.  He removes
his shirt, and lets it drift away into the sky, and now she
gazes at him with open mouth, gazing into the mirror of his
smooth body.

She runs, now, the grass pushing her along in great waves
of bluebell- surf, ever faster towards him, and stops just
short of him, and touches his chest.  And Christopher knows
that she can feel it, can feel the warmth of her fingers on
his skin, can feel the shiver that runs through him.

And her hands reach for him, and caress him, and he reaches
around her, and he takes her in his arms, and they lie down 
in the great bottomless ocean of bluebell- grass, and 
as their bodies blur together in a delicious song of
touch he kisses her, long and deep, tasting of her like a 
man who has never before seen color would taste a sunrise.
And he feels her hands at work between his legs, feels his
last clothes evaporate in the sun, gazes on the unpainted
landscapes of her body. 

With a hungry gasp she welcomes his lips as they travel the
length of her, her every sensation his own, and as they come
to her sex she sings a strange song in a language he has
never heard.  Still he knows the song is about him, and about
his dream.

And as that knowledge breaks over him, he feels himself
separating, falling back, losing her; feels himself
falling endlessly into the sky.

A song full of tears.  A song ending.  A man's voice on the radio.

Christopher wakes.

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