Initial reaction: open.
I’d do anything
to help you navigate
out of yourself.
Wrap you up, consume you, carry you
and your demons inside of me
until you are new again.
In that instant
squeezing so tight, in hopes
of putting all your pieces back together.
But that would take millions
of moments and we were only given one.

Processing reaction: closing.
Resorting to all I’ve ever known
helplessly watching from inside
locking myself behind the walls I build
to protect myself from harm, selfish.
Not wanting to lose what I’ve worked
so hard to construct.

Final reaction: I will not set
fire to myself
to keep you warm
but I will help you
find your own.

She severed the head of love's complacency
covering all I thought I'd discovered with a vice
like grip on a puzzling figuring out of normalcy
refusing any defining by turning pose in a trice

into fusions of fiery burns of my assumptions
until she was nowhere but there at every turn
churning the pressure with neat beats of passions
with valves registering a blistering alarm

a companion unhinged by dimensions dark tinged
not a snake charming woman nor a venomous fang
yet poison was taken with a cringe and a change
into a Hyde or a Jekyll I cannot decide things

When my grasps fall between all her parts half revealed
I gasp out of hunger pang eagerness to feel
slender slinking through fingers and thumbs unsolved
as a friend or a foe I can't know if she's real

Beyond physical perception I cannot be certain
because of fantastical attractions in legion
gone viral in tongues insubstantial past vision
yet assembled in ways which portend a contagion