Dayless, as we are.

I feel a great enchantment
bearing down upon me
lately, and though its
weight is nearly stifling
I couldn't imagine
a lovelier way
to have learned your name.

The First,
you call yourself,
some immortal balance
of age
and spirit,
blood
and teeth,
left
and right,
too exhaustively right.

I think to myself
where have you been,
these thousand years
I've lived
as I have lived,
breathing in synchronization
only with ghosts,
livid and sweet?

And I think to myself,
afraid of such incandescence,
it may have been
a millennia,
a vast stretch
of dry, barren waste,
since we've kindled
together,
but my bones,
they know
better.

Has it,
could it have been
and endless fable,
between us?
A pyre
so bright,
so alive with
mind,
fervor,
the cluttered veins
of all we have been,
that even the limbs
from this Earth
could never fully quench it?

My breath
holds tight in my chest,
waiting silently
to watch
as we crack,
desperate and deep,
into another
life.

Love.

I understand now the importance of having something to do. Whether it be a hallway that needs repainting, an instrument that needs deep attention, or a sudden interest in Japanese cooking, busy hands are always happier (or at least less consumed with sorrow). As a heart attempts to mend itself, the mind has to stay occupied with other, less important and less painful, things. If one's mind truly focused on the act of salvaging a tattered heart, it would surely force that heart to cease its relentless beating.

I always figured matters of the heart and mind to be worlds apart, almost impossibly different. Here, it seems, is where I get myself into trouble. Situations in life, I assume, have little bearing on matters of love. The silent, looming shadows of the past, likewise, should have no bearing on where the heart decides to travel. Long-dead romances, small fragments of dreams, and the places of quiet stars in the sky: so many excuses that I trusted never had the strength to crack the bond of love. How terribly wrong I've been proven to be...

Is it simply that my heart remains woefully wild and untamed? Unchecked by the pesky burden of logical oversight, I find myself throwing all that my arms can lift away for love. Love, ah! That one spark of real life magic that transcends everything; that unbearably beautiful choke-hold that brings all else to such new, pulsing life. Or is it just me, my foolish, thoughtless poem of love? It must be so- I've found myself alone in love. Alone in love. And still, I am here, trumpeting its deceivingly sweet song from every hill my tired legs will climb.

Over the years, I'd like to think I have come to understand the art of love. To love one's parents as I do is far beyond this realm here, I am certain, though it took many heart-wrenching years. To love one's child as I do is intensely unfair, for we've found in each other a near holy pair. To love one's self as I do, honestly and justly, has proven the most difficult feat, indeed. Not to sway overboard, one way or the other, but to see one's self fully and separately, and to love and cherish it, has been a lifelong, though startlingly precious, journey.

And to love one's mate, with all the compassion of a mother, all the thorough and tricky understanding of a friend, and all of the truly unyielding passion of a lover, well, I believed, for a short and vivid time, that I had mastered that form of love as well. Egad!

I find myself here, alone but for all the other loves I have divined, and I have trouble feeling anything but hollow. I forget, in my despair (as people always do) that three great bodies of love minus one does not amount to zero, of course not. I may feel hollow, but I remind myself that I'm a far cry from empty.

I do think I understand that shade of love, the love that has gone missing in my life, which is a small ember of warmth for me during these hollow days. So the struggle is over for me. It seems the time has come to hush that excitable heart of mine and sit quietly for a while. As a moth to a flame, love will find me.

With Myself.

There is such a delicious comfort
beginning to flow through my blood
Overnight,
I feel altogether brave,
gentle, strong,
fair.
I woke up with arms
so pure and willing
to wrap around their own
neighborly torso.
My thumbs kindly rub the rifts
running along
my elbows,

and my tongue
greets each
imperfect tooth with
joy.

There will always be
issues to overcome,
but I believe we're
getting closer
to finding some sort of
peace, deep in
the belly.
Through my trials with
anger,
desperation,
bitterness, and sorrow,
I have fallen
in love.

Moving.