"I remember your eyes —
the babe at my breast;
your hand in mine, grass-stained with summer —
my blackberry brother;
your laughter in my ear —
my dearest friend of childhood;
your palm steady on my shoulder —
my storm-laden father;
your iridescent grin —
my golden-moon uncle;
your cavernous sigh —
my agéd grandfather;
your breath in my lungs —
my truest Lover."
Passing through
from form to form,
known from all angles,
knowing,
lifetimes before lifetimes,
legs spread like a feast,
time and again
wishing
to be found.
All the stars
upon which I've wished,
bow down
from the heavens
at your feet:
amnesiac wanderings,
dusty prints
sleepwalking across Eternity
clutching the summer haze of childhood Edens
lost and regained
in the fractured paradise
of forgetting.
The cups run over
with sunflower wine,
dripping melancholy
between the lines
of the myths wherein we reside:
kings, queens, and in-betweens,
re-read, relived
for eons over.
The light has changed,
but falls the same,
draping ghosts
in the last smoke
from yesternight's embers,
the last note
from the bard's lyre,
fluttering lips to lips
at home in every language,
immortal
on mortal breath.
Dashed against the rocks,
tales and songs
lay scattered throughout the cobwebbed tomes.
From the ink-painted scrolls
I pick apart
You whom I've known
from the Time-spun spectres
throbbing fractals of blood and bone
along the murkiness
of sunken Archetypes.
Savoring these traces
my embrace waxes full,
and you smile inside me —
the sun, moon, and stars
rising, setting, rising
as I turn inwards to face You
bursting into Light beyond Color.
The Rainbow implodes in spirals
and shade fades to White:
yawning after comets,
grasping after dreams
where we dissolve back
to our native æther,
tails winding through trails,
caressing,
gentle and reverent
as one would a wild animal,
robed in silent understanding.
Primal grief floods my eyes
with memories of dying gods
and love-murders.
For already do I know
as tears flow
birthing galaxies throughout the universe;
already do I know
that again we must go
there and away,
paper cranes set aflame,
set adrift
down the Milky Way.
Adrifting, we drift
to and fro,
the lantern prayers of another time
washing ashore
lightyears from home
in the cycle of salvation.
Questions and answers
make their rounds
in dialogues beyond querent-observer,
while demons and angels hang,
warnings and accolades
pinned to adorn the astral forests.
And primal grief
blinds my eyes
as again Time stretches before me
its labyrinthine coils
into the gloom
of Presents
past and future.
Pathways shine,
painful and familiar
where my glittering footprints
have paced the geometrics
of loss and searching:
the light has changed,
but darkness falls the same.
Every atom remembers my name,
traversing after fragments of You
rent asunder at the hands of Fate:
Isis after Osiris,
***** after Baldr,
and us
everything we have been
and everyone,
chasing ourselves in circles
around and through the one
then the other.
And how I hold You,
and how I lose You
slipping in the wake of falling stars!
And how I know You,
and how I knew You!
How, by destiny or doom,
we are bound
with scarlet threads.
I still feel your gaze
gleaming bright behind the clouds
you loved so well.
The day you could no longer watch them
scars my heart
with sorrow and repose
that you now float among them.
O Stars! I see you,
would know you anywhere,
anytime,
anticipating the distance
closing between us,
our reflections growing larger
glimmering back and forth
in the darkness of Eyes.
"After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, longing to grow into one... And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy... yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover's *******, but of something else of which the soul has only a dark and doubtful presentiment."
— Aristophanes on the soul, excerpted from Plato's "Symposium"