where are all these words going?
where have they been intended to go?
i whisper
an incantation that
resonates
with desire.
it ends up
a curse.

i reach into the treasure box of language:
what was once shining and vital, far off,
now rots in my hand.

a toast,
a toast to every moment of clarity forgotten,
to every splendid line i put off writing down
until i could conjure it no longer,
to every sentence i should have spoken
and every silence i should have kept,
a toast to every deception i miscalculated,
to every promise broken, every bond neglected,
to every question i failed in formulating,
to every time when i should have wept
and every time when i should have refrained from weeping;
a toast, a toast to every embarrassment, every disgrace,
every regret,
to every time my hand should have been extended
and to every hand i stubbornly refused to accept,
and the rest, too, a toast to all the rest.

what else is there to do on nights like these
if not to get drunk
on memories,
the stronger the better? every spectacle
of microcosmic tragicomedy,
that makes up the vortex of my life,
is sublime before these disordered senses,
before it's revealed to be
pathetic and melancholy in the morning's lucid, lurid light.
a toast, then, that the night last the longest
and the next day pass by quickly enough.
a toast to every moment of clarity forgotten,
to every splendid line i put off writing down
until i could conjure it no longer,
to every sentence i should have spoken
and every silence i should have kept.

say sincere enough and it becomes sinister.
say it sincerely enough and it becomes...
—my angst is piqued, soon my anxiety will peak.
the nausea seeps in where the light fades out.—
the sirens, the silence, the single drumbeat in the bed:
getting to sleep will be a sorry affair,
the revelations coming too late, always too late.
i await the dreadful morning of forgotten dreams
when i must rise again and repeat and repeat,
my transactions and transgressions, this stasis,
repeat and repeat, until once more i can put off sleep no longer,
nor quite receive it neither.
"forgive me, forgive me."
i bid my ghosts the most sincere apologies.

i give chase with reckless abandon.
it's the thrill and the gamble.
it's the eyes that
pierce through and through
that tell me: "come closer,
this will destroy you."

you'd think enough had already been
written on the topic of being:
think again.
i can't bear to be without you,
it isn't worth the time,
over and over, thinking about, not being—with you.

be my bow,
and let the tension
of our love be the archer;
turn me into the arrow
and the bullseye.