I am afraid.
Afraid that I will lose you
To the merciless entropy of the Universe,
Or to the inexorable mystery of God’s plan,
Call it whatever you want, but whatever it is
I am afraid that it will take you from me at any moment,
And that I will be alone again.

I am afraid.
Afraid that every moment with you will be the last,
And our last shared experience will be an insignificant goodbye,
And that will be the last memory I have of you.
That is why I insist on physical contact, because
It reassures me that you’re real and
I am afraid that if I don’t constantly remind myself
I will forget what you felt like,
And then I will forget what we felt like.

I am afraid.
Afraid that I will lose you and not remember you,
That I will feel an unbearable and aching emptiness
And not know why.
I am afraid of fading memories,
As they suggest an essential futility in the beautiful endeavor
That was us.
They suggest that we is incapable of being constant,
That we is merely a rotation of the stone
As it continues its mossless journey to the sea.

I am afraid.
Afraid that in losing we I will lose a part of myself
And remain forever broken and immutably unwhole,
Unable to put myself back together because
My pieces are missing.
I am afraid that we is an essential part of me,
And that I will never recover from the loss.

I am afraid of losing you and afraid of losing me.
I am afraid of being alone and afraid of being broken.

I am afraid that we will lose we and
Then nothing will ever be okay again.

I am afraid.
I am afraid.
I am afraid.

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

This gentle forest, you lead me to, taking my hand, brings deja vu,
beauty in waves after waves invades, consciousness dances in pleasure,
profusion of colors, bird tweets, whisper of leaves,medley of fragrances,
mind swims in magic waters, when your lips touch mine, I faint.

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,--
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,--
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it - our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal -
Over the sky's hot rim,
The day's last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.