You are the smell of dawn in the evening.

You are the taste of champagne in flat beer.

You are the storm after the calm,
that calls a sailor to his doom, and his resurrection.

You are the pupil of my mind's eye.

You are the reflection of eternity in the backside of a spoon,
held only long enough to know on a level beneath foresight,
between bites of spaghetti and pesto.

I alone can call you from the trenches
to embed your nature in the navel of the world.
Your pulse is the very river Nile herself.
And as you pour your own prediction of flooding into my lips,
I know the life you give.

The moon can call an owl to its perch.
Just as the sun can burn a wolf to its bones.
But what loss is that?
They both meet destiny at a coffee shop,
sipping on the preconceptions of their parents, transposed into prose,
whose simple words will uphold the will of the world.

She watches the collision from a distance
because compassion is resistance,
because somewhere inside,
behind the elder-blossomed petals,
in the broom closet of her holiest of holies,
I found the soiled shards
of an old, abandoned mirror.

And when I put it back together,
my frame was no more captivating
than it appeared in my younger years.
So I broke what I had repaired.
And I ensnared what bits I thought would sell.

Oh, to be lost within a fractured self.
Adrift above puny parallel worlds
just long enough to catch myself blink.

Bored, and with a growing fear,
I let them disappear beneath the lid
of an alley dumpster.

Freed, they left my mind's eye
roaming aimlessly,
scraping moss from surfaces forgotten,
leaving a trail for me to follow,
meandering off into tomorrow.

And as the flakes of rain, turned stem and stalk,
have drawn the dreamers to that path,
the mats of woven plants they lay
betray our wishful thoughts
to trace the trails of yesterday's greats.

What it would mean to find that sacred place
abreast this body molded
from the darkest parts of space.