Look at me.
Look at how I used to wander the night
A craving so excruciating, so white hot, so secret
Blooming in my heart
Feeling my love like a disease-
A disease of the blood
Pumping molten silver through my veins and forcing me to struggle inside my skin
Walking, walking, always searching in the night
For something to cool me.
Look at how I used to think
That
Was joy.
It was a tainted joy. It was a stolen joy.
I loved
All alone I loved these people
And I burned with it,
I left scorch marks on the ground where I stepped,
I left embers burning and smoldering wherever I lay my hands, those nights.
I could feel the heat
Unbearable
Inside of me, like holding your hand over a candleflame.
It seared me. It ruined me, in many ways.
I worshiped the ashes of my clawing passion,
Subdued and restrained, imprisoned and
Hushed
For so long that it starved and rattled the bars of my ribcage in ire.
Look at me, how I was
How wrong
I was
That love could only be that.
Out of fear, I believed that love
Always meant shame.
Always meant secrets.
Always meant
Holding my burning heart in my hands and feeling the pain of it
Protecting somebody from my punishing passion.

But then you came.

You
With your soft eyes, green and shining and full of love.
You with your skin like silk
With words of love for me that brought no fear,
With hands that melted me from the inside out
And arms that held me together when I cried
Because I was ashamed of how I loved you.
You looked me in the eyes.
You looked that in the eyes
And you loved me for it.
You loved me for the love I have been hated for
All my life
And I could fall at your feet.
I could,
But for the first time,
I would rather lie in your arms.
I want your breath, your tenderness.
I want your solidity, the weight of you, the comforting way we fit together.
You are no god, to me. You are more. You are so much more.
No pedestals for you, no altars. I cannot bear to be so far from you as to worship.
I need you up against my heart, I need you in my arms.
You can't be an angel- I couldn't let you rise,
I would beg you to stay here on earth with me
And kiss me one more time and tell heaven
You'd be there tomorrow.
I don't want to start wars in your name,
I want to spend the rest of time
Murmuring it in my sleep as I roll over to kiss your shoulder
In the middle of the night
While the moonlight slants through the curtains to make your hair into a halo.
I want a life with you, not a death for you,
I don't want to suffer for you, I want to laugh with you.

I used to think love could only be pain.
And then you came.
And I have never been so happy to be wrong.
I have spent my life writing poems
That exult love, that sing praise, that idolize.
I've felt every one of them. Felt that love that seemed so full, so complete
Tried to explain it with words stacked on words
When what I was really trying to do
Was give it without giving it.
Give it without someone to take it from me.
I wrote to confess, to release.

And then you came.
And now I write for a new reason-

My love,
You are not the sun. You are not the moon.
You need no comparisons, no sweeping metaphors.
You are simply and perfectly
The person I want to wake up next to
Until the end of time
And that
Is everything I have ever craved.