You left yourself there.
I guess I was so used to seeing you
against those walls
and never pinning you to them
that I began to wonder
if you ever left that room.
It was never warm where we were
but we wore coats.
We listened for the howling wind
and turned our backs against it.
Your cheeks were flushed
and I could not help but rush
to look away.
You had this way of making people feel
like they were seeing something they shouldn't.
I am not very clever
but I know this:
you were happy and hopeless
and I tore that down.
You were a lark building his nest,
so timeless, so graceful, and I can attest
to the fact that you were content
exactly where you were.
There it is--
there is the difference between us.
I was a different sort of tired than you were;
mine was perpetual boredom with the world
while yours was a pleasant aching
deriving from a day of labor.
As I said,
you were the type to build a nest.
I was the sort that aspired to fly to heaven,
and hit a windowpane instead.
Call me Icarus,
and I will call you magpie.
I have never been one for terms of endearment,
but these seem to fit,
don't you think?
In a dream you met me for the second time. In the same dream you left the city, something you swore you'd never do.
In a dream you shone out
like everything I had ever been told
about the end, the eschaton.
Maybe you were meant to crush the serpent.
Maybe I was meant to write the book of Revelation.
We are not alive to exist in captivity but to consider how we might one day escape.