The story began one night in the dark
when most curious minds were asleep.
Sitting silently, only fingers tapping the keys,

“You tempted me like an empty page,” he wrote,
longing for a response of immediacy
that would fill his mind with more words,
the only thing he took comfort in.

She stepped aside from the voices
at her gathering to read his message.
“Emptiness,” she wrote back, “lives in the mind,
the habit of looking for what’s lost.

There is no zero in nature.
Let me tempt you with fullness instead.
Come and see what I see, and share what is there.”

As she sent the message, she swallowed deeply
knowing that what she offered was not quite a lie
but more of an unfulfilled desire.

“I can give you what I never had,” she thought.
Her mind wandered, filling
with all the ways that only emptiness can.

He wasn’t sure what she was offering him.
Whatever it was, he longed for it.
Her words flooded him with a feeling he couldn’t name.
Love? Desire?  Intoxication? Yes.

As the sun rose, he took no notice of fatigue, thirst, hunger.
He forgot the empty days,
the time spent looking in the mirror,
counting the lost years.
He began again to write.

hourglass laid on her naked abdomen
red pigment passionflesh
beheld by her own touch

What for you need a pen that writes black?
The man at the counter shot back
What has the blue done to offend you?

Look up the firmament
Over there the kingfisher
Once I had been to the sea
She was blue
Surely you prefer over black
A blue saree for her
So many men have staked their life
For the blue eyes of women

And then as if volleying the winning goal

Why not color all your wishes with blue
To paint the world blue-wish?

As I turned to walk away
My eyes caught the writing on his wall..

Black ink for the black heart
For the fool and the dull
Blue for the man of art
With matter in the skull

I had come to the wrong shop.

As I see your texts flash across my scene,
I notice how those letters
don’t look like they’re holding up your world.
They don’t look like they’re trapped on a single page of a hometown small atlas,
far away from any oceans.
As the first leashed fish I’ve ever seen,
I can see you tearing at your shrinking collar,
never having needed claws before.
Finding yourself belly up,
Accustomed to suffocating
On behalf of the guppies running from
Their own sharks.
I wonder if they know that they put their blood on you,
Making you smell like a prime target
For demons and sharks alike.
Hoping if you swim this way
And that
You’ll create a whirlpool,
Big enough, small enough,
Enough,
In your longer than expected attention span,
Hoping that the funnel might drag away their sharks,
But now you find it was not the demons,
But they who didn’t know how to swim,
And you
Struggling to teach what is innate to you,
Finding you’ve made your own endless funnel,
Drowning in the water that taught you to breathe.