I’ll let you see me. And I can shed a cloak like stardust if you promise the darkness won’t scare you away. I know it is frightening to see truth turn from white to midnight onyx in the span of half a day. I could be gentle too, and soft like morning skies. An alabaster shell you’ve polished well, a haven for saltwater tides. But I will fold and curl and settle along the veins wrapped in your skin. I’ll nest and breathe and home myself in pieces you’re terrified to miss. And when the sun rises and greets your dawning skin, I too shall find a path along your bones and leave before the light comes in.

I want to be your reformation
So holy a scripture you forget damnation
I want to be the heaviest book you've ever read
In a tongue so thick your skin will shed

"With that body you should get whatever you want"
And I am not just this body.
But
With this body I hold a heart that has loved flesh stretched across continents
A beating monster misunderstood but listened too, with teeth rigid and shined like opal or mother of pearl
A pounding prophecy promising something else, something else, something else is waiting beyond every time I have felt for the off switch with tired eyes
With this body I hold a mind stark in its quest for answers
One that does not settle on maybes or tomorrow or partial answers
A mind persistent in its pursuit for wholeness for oneness for connection to other tanks of skin covered bones with minds and hearts that beat and pound and pursue just as hard
With this body I hold a soul that is as vast as the cosmos.
Stardust sunken in long necked jars lining across my ribs whispering answers that my mind cannot read and my heart is not yet ready to see
This body homes a soul that is part moon, part star, part divinity.
One that finds its homes along stretch marks and supple flesh alike
One that is not dictated by the way I clothe or unclothe my skin
With this body I should get whatever I want because this body is a home and it has never been empty.

I found you sitting along the pages of your favorite book, on my bookshelf, replacing your favorite words with question marks and X's.
I think you wanted your flesh to be as easy to read but it wasn't.
Instead you took trains to faraway towns so you could find names for the words you could feel but not spell.
And you found home along skeleton streets empty with memories, ghost towns that mirrored your hometown but felt harder to leave.

My body is my altar and I'll let you worship at it if you want
But you shall not find any holy books along the shelf of my ribs
You will not find any ancient scriptures along my spine
You will not find any commandments carved in stone except
"I worship at a temple with closed doors
I worship at a temple that belongs to itself
I pray to an altar thats last candle has burned but there is no darkness here
There is no yearning to be lit
I worship at a temple whose stillness should not be mistaken for emptiness
I worship as an artist overcome by his muse

I want your bones, rattling cold, every one of them.
For a second, you won't stop, not even as you reach my flesh and cascade like a snowfall
Too quiet to make a sound,
Over each pearl that kisses your skin.

You have a traveler's soul.
And a mind that wanders just as restlessly
As a ship lost at sea
Refusing to sink and become forgotten.

You have the eyes of hand woven tapestries
Hung on the walls of childhood homes.
Laden with memories and first kisses
Riddled with promises and Sunday afternoons.

You have the bones of a life felt from the other side.
A spirit touched by what it means
To be human
And what it means to be broken.