I woke up at angles with you
---a parallelogram, opposite but equal,
my thoughts in constant rotating view
---a diagram, showing us where
our homes are laid to rest,
where streets became dead spiders
caught in their own webs.

If we are in transit via tunnel,
aqueduct, or escalator,
it might be cinema.

If we lose atlas in the worship of light,
it might be cinema.

But I can't find you here;
here, where they used to build ships
from sand and steam
and science fiction;
where they used to design
buildings so as to create
a dissonant and mournful
whistling sound when wind
blew through them
---ostentatious things;
dead people’s things.

Through walls and underneath concrete, dug so deeply
into the wide plains
and withered, gnarled tree roots
of an agonizer's conurbation,
is a space halfway to the zenith,
charting the prescribed power
of in-betweenness.

Never again will we draw meaning from
our proximity to one another.

Two moths fluttered across one another's paths
before the breaking of dawn.

One of the moths mistook the other
for a butterfly from a distance,
but the closer they flew towards each other
the moth knew that there was no difference between the two.

At first, the older moth thought the younger was a mirage of herself.
But this moth that stood before her was not the moth herself,
but rather a version of herself that she had shed long ago.

The older moth told the young moth masked as a butterfly
that she must shed her false skin
so that they could fly to the moon, where they were both destined to go.

She offered to show this moth hidden beneath the façade
a path to her true destiny,
but the younger moth flew beneath the healing rays of the night
and descended into a world where she would never be accepted for her true essence.

In the end, the young moth flew to the sun and eviscerated into the fires of her own suffering.
The stars of the night burned bright for the loss of a soul who could not see that her beauty would have shined through any night.

‘Aren’t you afraid of my darkness, my dear?’ Hades asked with mischief in his eyes.
‘No.’ Persephone replied, ‘You haven’t seen mine yet.’

Agreed, that love is attraction
    - though not only surface sensual,
      as you maintain,
      not only toward the external -
But that sweet involuntary pull is
      also inward for expansion;
      for interior sifting
      and resolution.
Love is primarily attraction to
      unexplored depths
      of the self.




- fr