From Darkness These Words Are Bred

You. My heart: The entire universe and you its only sun. I burn.

My child of the desert night, you send me far across forbidden sands, one faltering step and then another, crushed in moonlight as I burn.

Total darkness is a lie that keeps us spilling into each other; there is no light but in you, no darkness but in me. I burn.

This cup of silence I have invoked between us, this hard poison I drink in gulps until there is only your face inside the smoky glass, I burn.

Yours are the eyes that explode my every discretion. Yours, the breath I infuse in me.

All around us people watching, old promises are knives slicing every word that leaps from my mouth like starlings falling from their nests.

My every glance I fear telescopes what crouches hidden inside this bitten apple beating in my chest. I whisper when I wish to shout. I run when I wish to take your hand and hold it tightly to my throat. Tear them out, these dark secrets, from me because they are yours, all because of you.

In Heaven, the titan-children of Zeus will fall, dead or impotent, and here I stand among them, my arms are tired and my legs are tired, my shield bent, my spear bloodied.

I would do your dark works; gladly walk the long road of ash to Hell to cradle in my hands your tears.

I am here with you and I am no one. It was for you all along. Command these arms and these legs. My heart will not listen, it is no longer my own.

The soul is a star. Mine reaches out, seeks some common frequency within you because I sense its unearthly reason for being and it has all to do with you.

Late in the night, I feel you close, so close I hack at the threads of my own astral light, the ghostly filaments that connect us, for you cannot know, cannot see what my soul conceals, this brilliant thing, so pure, unstained, this supernova, because we know how this ends.

By now you know I adore you; that everything I've said is darkness and everything I've left unsaid is light.

Beneath the ocean lies a chest. In the chest, a box. In the box is all that I have tried to hide and everyday I try to hide and everyday I want to tell you that this is what moves me, this unreal phantasm cloaked in vapor around my heart until you smile, then it is real and I rise until I dare to hope you'd let me touch your hand and walk with you in silence or whisper across this small space between us and tell you there is always this wisp of hope so let me burn.

The shadows slide across your face, my fingers.

For all the epochs of the universe, we are already running dry of time. Soon I will speak and you will disappear and I will find that ash and dust are us and this was all for nothing for no one will remember how we passed here.

And yet, right now, right here my words transform to spirits that drift through the ether and provoke the fates that they might find you thinking this of me: We are of the same tribe.

Then, all the gods and demons there were could not undo our mystic transformation.

All the world would rage around us while we worshipped each other through the pagan night and none who have ever desired to savor such fire would soon forget our names.