I
He has hands and feet now.
And eyes that can close off the world to such a limited view.
  Look at the sun and it is bright,
  Even when the sky shifts to his other sight,
  That warps the fabric of space into view.
  Gravity bends around and around the star burning above,
  Trapping his gaze under its twisting fire.
He forces the vision away, blinking
Once and then twice, then thrice while it lingers.

He breathes in and out
Tucks back a strand of hair glowing red even if there wasn’t light.
Humans see the brightness,
The nameless shade slipping through their thoughts
Slithering down their necks, causing the hair to rise.
When it catches his eye,
When he lets it catch his eye
The dying red star, the one he wasn’t finished slurping down,
Glimmers in those strands of hair.

II
Once, a very long time ago yet so recently in his memory,
There was a hole, gaping and black
Not quite as empty as humans like to pretend that they are.
Stars and planets, bits of rock with life clinging to the surface
Sliding down, down, down what was once a mouth.
That’s all, everything he was, only a mouth to devour.
Until—

His hands clench.
His hands, his feet, his eyes
The mouth closed so very tight
Even if past the lips only round little teeth reside and not
A bottomless abyss.
He might be wrong about that, though
Never could quite build the courage to face a mirror and open wide,
To see if that echoless emptiness still waits inside this carbon-construction of a body.  

He breathes in and out, feels the air slip into lungs
And out again unlike those stars and planets from so long ago.
How was it? How did he become like this?
During that time when his appetite was vast,
Yet he couldn’t have been larger than a drop of ink on a page.
How did he grow, yet become so contained
That the light can strike off this form and not fall into him forever like it did then.

III
There once was an item of science and a priest of old—
The light, the light that doesn’t fall in like the other rays slips its fingers
Into the maw, pulling its jaw open to the point that it
Cracks and realizes that
Its eating, that’s what it—he is doing
That’s all he’s doing, and he wants more
Not more to eat, but more to existing.
And the light pulls out the half-eaten star,
Weaving the red and the orange and the yellow
Into strands that settle past shaking shoulders.

The memory of what he once was presses down upon him as
He wraps his arms around
Those shoulders that only shiver now
Under the weight of boundaries
That keeps the people walking by from falling into him.
He looks back up
Searching for the light that molded him into this shape.
The sun is too dim though, the rays brushing too weakly against his face
To be whatever god forced him into human limbs.

Shoulder to shoulder,
We walk through the halls that have become our own
Kingdom in a world not our home.

It’s funny how that works,
How we’ve become nearer to what we want of the other
But the same distance has not truly been crossed here in this place
Where we were forced to grow up again.

To say that we are closer to our goals,
To the unfinished wants of those places which exist beyond these stars,
May be a lie, but I’d like to think
That maybe there is a sliver of truth in those dreams
Which we have managed to share in our passing.

To say that we’re both far from home
Might be a bit of a stretch,
Since simple roads and passable oceans fail
To describe the true distance between worlds
Ripped apart so that only faded myths
Whisper of how once they were one.

We are not quite
Sitting right across from each other
In libraries where books scream secrets
While we glance up with the silent truth of distrust.
We are far from where we should be,
Yet if either of us want to traverse past the stars
And into the worlds that exist in mathematician numbers
And in the dreams we have at night when the other is no longer watching,
We need to do more than simply wait for that moment
Where our eyes meet once in connection rather than separation.

It’s a tall order
Sloping miles above my head in loose handholds
That crumble to gravel at my touch,
Rolling under my feet sliding back
Further than I can crawl forward.
It hurts in scraped palms
And hearts of my own both beating
In and out of my chest.
My knees tremble at the eternity above my head.
But the view,
The sun unhindered by Earthly clouds,
The stars that I had lost sight of
Make this treacherous climb worth all the pain
Of one foolish enough to fall off the mountain the first time.

A fool once said
That “there is power and those too weak to seek it”
As he burned upon the pyre of his own foolishness
Blinded by willful ignorance as motherhood,
The primeval weapon of life,
Descended upon him like the sparrow pair
Drive down the hawk
And the mother car gouges
The human hand that grabs at her kittens.

Love carves open fools with
Its power stretching back
To when life first raged against the death
Daring to take the newborn future of the world.

He might bite down on it,
The glass between his lips
Swirling red with wine he swallows
While fixing withering glares
At me, who only points out the obvious
As the guests murmur among themselves,
Unaware of our little argument
That cracks the glass in my hand,
Seeping little red rivulets
Stain the white cloth underneath
As I smile, sharp teeth glinting.
He never looks away, a reassurance even when we curse one another.
Regardless of what we do, we won’t shatter.

The dead don’t rise, but he does
Like awakening from a dream
And realizing that the only eternal thing
In this decaying universe is himself.

The body looks the same
The ash on his tongue possesses the same flavor as at the time of death,
A goal that will elude him unlike the rest
Who will never be trapped by the fear
Of their actions haunting them forever.