Lives Collide

The stars in your eyes

The sun is rising through a cloud,
I'm in a wax museum.
With crystal church windows up in the sky
my bare feet soundless in peach-orange light

Each statue is a person I loved
over many, many lifetimes.

Most I remember,
some, I don't.

Your wax tastes like sugar
as I kiss your cold forehead.
You start to shift,
aflame with spirit

'Evangeline—is that really you?'
You use my oldest name.


your hand is already warm with sun
and something like blood—
I take it.

and walk like a picker through a ripe summer orchard,
each fruit too sweet to choose from

My library of love is endless.

I want to kiss them all, my doves
and bring him or her to life again
I moan, a hungry traveller, but—

'You were my first,' I whisper.
Your eyes crinkle at the corners.
The way they sometimes used to do,
before you took the robes.

'I know,' you say even softer,
your words breathing honey into my soul.

We dance upon galaxies of silk spun thread
their colours just like rainbow paint
We drift through savannahs teeming with beasts,
as glorious as nature does make them

We travel the world
As laughing ghost tourists
Paris, the Amazon, Rio and Rome,
But settle on our favourite place,

your godfather's cabin.
Simple, by the lake with a fireplace
fuelled by logs, not gas.
The pipes freeze over in winter,
and the snow? it comes up to your knees. 

We used to have fun here,
alone and afar
If I still had skin it would tingle.

You whisper the name of old joys in my hair
Then take my fingers, kissing all ten,
I imagine I can feel it.

'So many lives together,' you say.
—'But why did you leave me the first time?'


I didn't mean to ask that.
The energy crackles between us.
It's the rock that falls from heaven again
the one that crumbles happiness again

'Because we needed to grow, alone. 
We were flowers that leant on each other
if one dies the other
gets crooked and wilts,
he follows his lover's lead.
We both taught the language of spirit...
I chose the cloth and you chose the wand, and-'

A thousand 'sorry's' are stars in his eyes
burning and distant 

with fingers on his quivering lips, I kiss him.


Now he is something saltier than honey,
Deeper and darker and needing. 

'I understand,' I manage to say
the shadows that dance
in his eyes are exorcised.

'Come on,' he says, smiling.
'Let's go play in the Akashic library.'