People like you always fascinate me.
Mercurial, distant, unfathomable, sometimes harsh,
You remind me of cold waves crashing on cliffs-
Separate, guarded, a depth so icy it calls, hypnotic,
At once the grasping fingers of a brutal undertow,-
"TOUCH ME."-
And the punishing fists of the swells that batter the rocks,-
"Stay away,
Kneel."
Violence and gentleness wrapped up together.
Are you lonely in there?
I wonder if an ocean swirls beneath your skin,
If the pent up power of it ever presses out and strangles you,
Demanding a freedom your bones cannot give.
Sometimes I see you staring out at the rain.
I don't mean to, but I pause and study your profile silhouetted
And for a moment I think I recognize the look on your face-
A longing for that kind of release,
A private, hushed need I've felt in myself a thousand times when the clouds have broken and flung rain at the earth.
A craving so heavy and urgent it becomes a wound, precious but aching.
The silver of the sky got all caught in your eyes today for the barest second, and I knew I was right to search your face for pain:
I've rarely seen a storm reach inside a person like that and grab hold.
I tried not to intrude, not to witness it, but...
You were so still, gazing out into the cold.
So isolated, so contained.
You strike poses like a cut stone, almost hostile, almost fragile-
"Do not lay hands on me.
They will leave no mark,
They will find no purchase.
They will change
Nothing."
When I look at you, motionless as a marble statue [if just as chiseled]
I can't help but think of every time I've ever truly suffered,
How it stilled me,
How the more chaos roiled in my veins the more the little humanities of me slipped away-
Breath, blinking, the fidgets and shrugs and sighs that make life apparent-
Until I may as well have been made of porcelain,
Brittle and hard and
Compressed.
I wonder what turns you to stone.
Pain? Wariness? Apathy?
When I see you, arms crossed, face closed,
I look at your eyes
And they reach.
As the rest of you presses into itself, crushed into hard lines by a mesmerizing desire
To push the world away,
Your eyes betray something slight inside of you that seems to ache for contact, for escape.
It is that part of you that bids me look.
That little, desperate glimmer of yearning that makes you a hurricane on the sea,
A wild, frustrated, chaotic force of nature
Barely held inside a marble body.
You're like a play, did you know?
Caught in amber, caught in ice,
The push and pull equal, opposite,
And tragic
Because they are impossibly and flawlessly matched.
It is this tension that makes you beautiful,
Not your sculpted face or smooth chest:
I can never be certain if you feel trapped by the very loveliness that brings things to you,
More vast than it allows you to be
And more complex.
I know only that when my porcelain lips clinked against your marble ones,
I recognized you
As something a little bit like me.