Sometimes at night when I turn over and my hand slides along the small of your back
I can feel the changes beneath your skin.
Sitting next to you, I read you like braille
Like something you need to touch to feel the meaning of.
I know you are a storm beneath your skin.
Sometimes I feel lightning reach out
To the answering chaos in me.
Our suffering makes our togetherness
Electric.
Cataclysmic.
We could crumble mountains.
I don't know if you know your own wildness inside,
Wilderness.
I think inside you are vast and lonely, wonderful but vaguely sad,
The way the trees sound when a breeze sighs its way through them and makes them sway.

Sometimes I feel a coldness from you like a chilly night without a fire
The kind of cold that starlight and silence bring-
Not a hostile chill, like the sharp fingers of frost or ice,
But just a distant kind of... Containment.
A solitude, like the desire to curl into the rocks by the river and become one by touch.
A desire to be still.
It scares me. I don't know how to reach that part of you.

Sometimes I look at you and I see storm clouds and wildfires in your eyes,
I see the end of days, and earthquakes, and brutal hurricanes,
But I see them through glass, as if you've stepped inside a mirror and imprisoned your rambling hurt to keep the world safe-
I see it through the cracks in a briar wall that's sprung up suddenly and sharply, tangled and complex, a warning.
And although I don't want to be
I am warned.

I want to touch
But I am so very good with boundaries
So very
Sensitive.
I feel the changes in the air
The way a deer in the forest may shoot its head up at the scent of a hunter miles away, caught on an errant breeze.
You change what I breathe in and out,
You change my weight and my texture.
Sometimes from you I can close my eyes and feel what warm honey must feel like in essence-
If sunlight found purchase in the air.
I feel fields of wildflowers and slow, dreamy, balmy nights and days at the seashore with diamonds capping the waves.
Sometimes I feel from you the tickle of cut grass, and the smell of fresh rain, and what a butterfly's furry wings would feel like if stroking them wouldn't make them crumble like spun sugar.
Sometimes I feel from you the slow, deep pull that I remember from sitting at the bottom of that coral reef in St Thomas-
The heat of the day sinking in layers through the water to hold me suspended in graceful pressure-
Poised to be swallowed by something much more significant and much hungrier than me.
And sometimes there is simply cold, the way I said,
As if the wind has somehow changed and left me adrift, sails dead, in a sea that offers no sustenence and no explanations.
In those times of stillness I wait, breathless,
Cautious-
They always pass,
So far.

I sit beside you and hold my breath
Hold my hands.
I sit and look at the grass
At the sky
But I see you instead
Silent beside me,
An unknown, a mirror maze
All of a sudden sunlight
And all of a sudden shadows.

When you go dark and silent I want to start digging.
I want to sink to my knees and pull apart the earth,
Find its heart, hot and sticky and molten,
Burning with the secrets of a forever life in the belly of a fragile stone.
I want to claw it out and put your hands on it,
Watch it feed your soul and sear away that terrifying cold.
Light you up so that you will never curl up silent around a black glass starless hailstorm ever again.
I feel the dirt under my fingernails and how
Odd it is
That it is familiar, from scrabbling out of grave after grave,
Confused and reborn and shivering.
How odd that now I am tunneling towards what remade me so many times
To try to break the laws of nature and bring it to you
Before you ever have to sink towards it.

But I feel from you. And then I don't. And then I do.
And it wakes in me an unsettled longing more powerful than my history.

I feel from you the silence right after the last note of a symphony fades
Before the audience applauds
Before anyone has even taken a breath.
I feel that exquisite beauty
And the fear that it will shatter.
(The fear that is the knowledge that it will shatter.)
I feel all of this from you
For you and
I think it might be
Love.

Fresh grass kisses my cheek
I inhale the earth’s scent
And feel the buzzing ground

Seeds root up from the soil
Leaves laugh in the breeze
And I try to exhale the sound

Birds make a call
Out to red bellied mates
I crush the dirt in my hands

I watch you dip
Your toes in the river
And hope stems from every branch

When our bodies converge
I taste the sun
And a mist begins to emerge

We branch apart
You’re breath’s like pine
And I become a drop in the earth

And here I go again
Opening closed doors
Because I’m tired of being shut out
No amount of
Overturned stones
Could break through your glass house
I’m on the outside looking in
And someone snuffed the light out

here we write our epic
from first post
to last bugle fading
and all your readers
throw in a handful of dirt
the day you stopped singing
and turn away to their bowers
to continue in this stranger than fiction endeavour
writing out their hearts and minds one big poem stitched together

Sadness clusters my chest
The phone woke me up this year
And now I’m mourning, this thought,
Your loss, even though you’re here

If atoms are what you’re made of
How’d you slip right through my hands
I dreamt of you last night
Sinking into death, falling into quick sand

You’re skins not wrinkled
You’re so young, so why are my eyes red
It’s just a touch of cancer
That they found inside your head

I’ve done enough of research
I know how cancer cells grow
But this isn’t how I pictured
One of us would go

They told me they would slice it up
Cut it out of you
This poison that’s taking over
And turning your lips blue

I told them not to wait one minute
Every second counts
I left for lunch that afternoon
Before it was announced

Last night I dreamt that
I was holding tight your hand
But your grave sights full of dirt
They filled your lungs with quicksand

Chemo shrunk the tumor
But killed the you inside your brain
The left side of my bed is empty
It’s just the mattress, and the frame