They call it madness when a man
knows the rain by name
and still walks out to meet it.
I have been versed in your absence
longer than most people
have been fluent in love.
The distance between us
is not geography.
It is the only honest thing
either of us has said.
Some call this devotion.
I call it reckoning.
The body keeps its own marks —
what it opened for,
what it refused,
what it memorized
without ever being asked.
You were the question
my nerves veins
answered before I could.
They buried me in
the machinery of it.
They were thorough.
They were certain.
I am what germinates.
Dark is where —
the deciding happens.
There are people watching
who have already written the verdict.
They are not wrong about the facts.
If you understood these tears
they would be pearls.
Else it is just the sea.
See I'm not ashamed
of the ocean
I apparently contain.
I have looked for you
in every city that moves too fast
to notice it's grieving.
You were the one thing
I couldn't make legible
by studying harder.
Take the crown.
Take the palace
and everything you needed
me to stop feeling.
I kept the knowing.
I keep the feeling.
The seed doesn't negotiate
with the soil
about what it intends to become.