When I laid my head on your chest to listen to the aria of your being,

I let the sound lead me into the darkness that lives under my eyelids,

and I found myself on a tightrope, suspended over the chasm of death and life.

The old monsters from the rift reached up to take me down into the dark

but sudden reverberations of the rope gave me back up to the light—

and the song inside you was still there where I had left it beating,

accompanied now by the song I heard against your chest as you spoke,

reassuring me that my aria still played, too, as yours beat softly on next to mine.

I sometimes wonder

if you do not truly grasp

the sincerity of my love.

You broken, wondrous thing,

how can I make you understand?

When you and I met,

when you befriended me

and deciphered the map

written on my heart

that I’d lost the key to,

All the black and white

that barred my freedom

faded into gray;

And when you kissed me,

I fell away from the place

where I’d been chained;

I wonder every day now,

as I fly freely on the wings

you showed me I’d always had,

how I can express to you

the depths of my devotion,

and my unconditional love.

You, who loves and loves me

and expects so little in return,

how can I make you see

this invisible pledge

burning inside my heart?

I lie awake in my cold bed and feel you all fly away from me,

to thought-worlds and color-places that exist in the mist of dreamers’ minds.

Even the sky leaves me here, and falls away to black expanse.

(I wonder, as I shiver with the thought, if it scares anyone else

to realize that daylight is the shroud and darkness the reveal?)

I wish I could follow you all, down to your misty, secret worlds. 

I would kiss you, take you into my arms, tell you lovely things,

if you would find me here, and lay your warm body next to mine

for a soft, sweet interruption from my introspective reverie. 

Please wish away your scars no more.

They’re the timeline of your life;

They’re the bumps in the road

that brought you into my arms.

I climbed in bed next to my sleeping love. His arms and hands reached out from the mist of his dreams, found and pulled me close, and he kissed my forehead. Like always. I trust in this unconscious action, in the feeling of his sleeping hands knowledgeably traveling the curves of my body. I trust in this simple thing like I trust in the sureness of a breaking of a wave on some distant ocean shore.

The unavoidable fact that you will one day leave this world

steals you from me even now, even as you hold me.

By the time you breathe your last, I’ll have lost you

a thousand times.

How do I stop this death ritual? My morbid tenuousness

is shriveling the blossoms you managed to grow.

Please tell me how to appreciate this life of mine

before it is gone.