"Life is hard,"
she said,
"and life is sad.  Life is one
thousand crevices carved into your heartscape,
By human fingernails,
even your own."

"You will feel strongest, somehow,
when you cry.
You will feel that there is nothing left
that can harm you
and you will be wrong,
and you will be right.
And you'll beat into your head your own lessons
and others will beat the
kindness
and
empathy
right out of your mind.
You will be shaken,
rattled to your core
time after time,
and each time you'll find that your heartscape, your center is more
brazen than blind.
It has its own mind; It has never resigned.
Swim the caverns you've carved
into your insides and
realize -

You are not damaged, but exposed.  
Opened up like a
flower
blooming toward
the light."

I.
Tenuously,
the aging outline
of her solemn face twirls,

tracing the meandering galactic tendrils
that emerged from her ten-thousand light year goodbye,
the kind of heartbreak that builds upon the horizon like an avenging angel,
like a city of jagged shadows eating away the starscraping brightness of the past.

As lightning bolts streak across a cluttered heartscape,
the drumbeat of time thunders forward
and we are leaves on her river,
ever approaching the hungriest waterfall.

II.
Swaying in the wind,
we can become one.

If you offer your hand,
I will hold it in mine.

If you contemplate the universe,
I will adore you even more.

If your deepest thoughts
are withering in chains
in order to smooth away
the beautiful complexities of your frail essence,
I will inject a thousand caresses and whispers
into your day so you realize there is another way.

We are artists,
with singularities dynamiting
our hearts from day one.

We are storytellers with the wintry breath
that haunts the blackness of Now
like an old woman in the window that isn’t there,
pulling dreams from absolute zero,
capturing quantum butterflies from
the expanding vacuum of space
like we were born to do it,
which we so ******* were,
my sweet.

Here,
embraced by velvet starlight,
soaring to the peculiar gorgeousness
of songs we may one day share,
the rhythms and words of the cosmos
dance across the planets and stars,
stumble towards the humble journeys of asteroids and comets,
revealing in each step that even
the most minuscule subatomic particle,
even the grandest map of the cosmic microwave background,
has always been rushing joyfully in our bloodstreams,
thumping along with every heartbeat,
tasting the immaculate heavens with every kiss.

III.
I want to see the fire
of midnight in your eyes.

Swaying in the wind,
we can become one.