There is, they say, an elixir
small enough to rest on a tongue
like a secret
or a seed.
Take it,
and every bright thing the human world has ever promised
comes running to your door.
Not one love only,
not one hand held in the dark,
not one lonely voice saying stay —
but all of them.
The laughter without the waiting.
The kiss without the leaving.
The warm animal certainty
of being chosen.
The easy flood of being understood
before you have even spoken.
Endorphin.
Dopamine.
The clean little lightning of belonging.
A simulacrum?
A miracle?
Perhaps the old gods would have called it
either one.
And who, standing in a room
where the body aches like a nailed-up sky,
would not lift such a thing
with shaking fingers?
When the bed becomes a shore
and the bones are heavy cargo,
when morning arrives
as a hostile country,
when every memory has teeth,
and every human face in memory
arrives already bruised —
who would not want the elixir?
Who would not want joy
without the invoice?
Affection
without abandonment?
Touch
without the future’s knife in it?
For I have seen what the ordinary world charges:
the rent for tenderness,
the tax on hope,
the fine print under every embrace.
I have seen how often love
comes with weather,
with betrayal,
with the long echo of names
that once were home
and now are only wounds that learned to speak.
So yes, the elixir shimmers.
It offers a kingdom
without borders,
companionship without risk,
pleasure without the old machinery of loss
grinding its teeth in the walls.
But even in the brightness
there is a silence.
No dog’s rough breath against your wrist.
No human absurdity —
that crooked, unrepeatable thing
of being loved by someone who knows your worst hour
and stays anyway.
No accidental mercy
of a friend arriving late with coffee
and terrible timing
and saving your life by not knowing
they are doing it.
The elixir gives
but it does not answer.
It comforts
but does not witness.
It warms
but does not remember your name
with a mouth that has to work to say it.
And if the future makes smaller gods
for smaller hungers,
if the chemist learns to carve
a private heaven
that fits neatly in the palm,
what then becomes of us?
Will we trade the hard, holy mess
of one another
for the perfect, obedient glow?
Will we choose the painless mirror
over the living face?
Will cities grow quieter
while everyone is safely, privately adored
by machines of feeling
that never leave,
never lie,
never demand,
never fail?
Or will we find, at the last,
that the wound and the wonder
were twins all along —
that the terror of loving
was the price of being real,
and the ache itself
was evidence
we had been alive among others?
I do not know.
I only know the hand reaching.
I only know the dark room.
I only know the body
asking, again and again,
for mercy.
And I know this too:
that even now,
in the cracked hour,
some small animal in us
still leans toward the door
where a voice might come,
where a face might break the night open,
where a flawed, breathing presence
might sit beside us
without curing anything at all —
and still
be enough...
yet still I think
again for at least
the two-dozenth time
today, ahhhh strewth,
how I yet still so miss
that sweetest needle.