There are things we come back to:

People we can’t stop loving. Places that sing and sigh. Words gritty and livening inside our mouths. Songs that shake us out of our indifference, make us feel. Those little coffee shops rattling with charming oddities. Stories of scares that turned out to be enjoyable thrills. Photographs where their hands are in yours and you are both beaming. Poetry. Motion. Light.

It’s all the same. All the wonder and heart-twist, all the love and loss.

…

There are things we come back to.

There are things we come back to, and there is you.

…

A long time ago, I dreamed of you. Back when everything was uncertain and fantastically, despairingly painful.

In this dream, you looked like the end of one world and the beginning of another. Like a door cracked part of the way open. I wanted to walk through to the other side. I wanted to see what this new world was like. I wanted rebirth. I wanted you. Simply, stupidly.

I’ll never forget the way the night and all its neon lights played with your face. I’ll never forget waking up with a pulse faster than a bird’s, and swinging my legs over the edge of the mattress, and blinking at the wall as I decided it was time to take my poor, engorged heart to the page.

I didn’t write that day. I confessed. I admitted the unadmittable: Love, being in love.  

I erupted.

…

Tell me to stop romanticizing you and I will be defiant, I will refuse your request.

Tell me to stop rhapsodizing you and I will tell you that I have always done so, have always been composing poems within your orbit, as if, like some kind of Jerusalem, all roads lead to you.

Tell me stop idealizing you and I will say it’s impossible for me, for someone who falls in love with everything raw and good and blooming, for a writer, for a woman who is all blush beneath her sarcasm, all stomach-flutter beneath her carefully arranged neutrality.

Tell me to stop and I will rebel.

I will keep writing you as you exist. Crackling with energy. Sharp, like new ice. Flagrant.

I will keep drawing upon language to arrange as close an image of you as I can possibly come.

I will keep telling all the world how you are collision upon collision of forest and wind, endless.

You cannot stop me.

…

There are things I come back to.

This (eyes that never fail to see straight through to my core; a laughing mouth; beautiful hands tuning a violin in sun-dusted silence as I watched with my own poised over piano keys, wondering despondently why our duets were always love songs);

and this (a small, privately lovely box of canvases with your trees, star-swirls, phoenix enflamed, and other rising things; two girls, a bookstore, a meeting of souls, a rescue from excruciating loneliness; us sprawled out side by side on an uneven cellar floor beneath the glow of lights strung everywhere, awash in amusement because parties were never something we excelled at);

and this (the moment it all became clear; the answering longing; the brilliance of synergy; the soft and glorious voyage of our hands toward each other; the inevitability of it all).

You, always.

You.

When? Who? Where? Am I something? What am I now?*

Time has bestowed upon me a chaste and sacred gift,
The likes of which has been long sought after and yet the voice within has taught me to doubt my strong inner virtue.
Lambent spheres of diadems composed of flame follow me to the world's corners,
I lie here in confusion as each *epitaph above me in the clouds places devastation upon me.

Who am I? I ask this in need of all the answers that lurk within me.. Who am I?
I ask this over and over again until there is nothing left within me, till' the voice within me collapses into naught and this whisper of a soul commands perseverance that will lead to success.
Tragedy and a cord that leads to the Sun materialize in my midst, my escape venue has been revealed in the utmost way possible.
The light in the skies has turned into golden thread, the emitted radiation and heat of this celestial body is turned into golden threads of ethereality that are tethered to the earthy soil beneath my feet.

The Sun and Moon rise and take a strip of Earth along with me, I rise to become one with the Universe and she greets me with an abysmal black hole of nothingness.
I am devoured as a parasitic being envelopes my whole quintessence and She, yes She the Universe glows within my soul; we become one in the same as I vanish into a wormhole.
I am nothingness and nothingness is I, ethereality composes what I am and am not all at once.
What am I? What am I? A galactic burst of nebular gases; a vapor vanishing into the cosmos and preventing disarray by maintaining Her equanimity.

Love; I tire of this being known as enamorment; She is the enemy of my former existence.
Denial and dereliction have brought me to a place of escape; I have fled to the distant spans of the Universe hiding from the blue shift radiation of my former existence.
I have been compacted into a shell and no one can tell me that there was a virtue in that once beloved dream called love.
But what about now?

What am I now? Am I nothingness or am I something? An impossibility in this world that we know to be full of sensible notions and vain equations.
We try to make sense of things that lament us; that grieve us so.
We detach from the heartache of what we once were when we were conjoined with the being of a former life.
A life where the butterflies of our youth remind us of the fondling of our souls; when our endearment to another celestial body emitted a gravitational pull.

Who are you?
That is what I said the first time I saw your face!
But now I sit hear, being the incorporeal being that I am!
Being unable to shed tears, I have no need for useless emotions...

I have never needed that which had only corrupted the elixir of my rhapsodizing dreams.
I wish to float above the clouds once more; I wish to be on Cloud Nine in another life; I wish to be resurrected with a corona of love emanating from my heart, spirit and soul.
What shall I do now?
I'm a nothing, a love deprived and nonexistent being who forfeited his force of nature known as the will to live on.

That gale of epic means; that tsunami ravaging the enemies of repose; placidity follows disaster you know...
When all of this is over, when my nonexistent form is chosen to be brought back into a materialized form, maybe, just maybe this intergalactic potion known as love with burst the confines of this vessel of mine.
Maybe the future self will evolve into a being carrying the stars within his innards and the waste of impurity will become a cleansing water of benediction.
Glittering skin and iridescent bones are hopeful layers of a multidimensional being which has yet to come into existence.

Just when I thought it was over, I give myself another chance to inspect the confines of the Earth again.
I prowl the black hole that I am, that I wasn't and that I became in search of an escape.
You are something; that is what I hope to hear on the other side; I hope that I am merely dreaming since the dream that I had once entertained has now become a nightmare, one filled with despondency and convolution.
I am drenched in thought like a sponge; how am I capable of thinking without a physical being to inhabit?

Am I just this speech bubble with thoughts inserted into it?
Have I become the dream of another?
Am I really just an ephemeral stench, a fleeting odor that is repugnant to the observer or the creator of my thoughtful existence?
Maybe I'm just a mere figment of the imagination...

Lay simplistic in my nervous embrace,
though my fingers shake with your purity.
A great, gold-backed moon-palette for a face,
and mind acquiescent simplistically.
Your features, sharp and definite, are free,
and none may mumble a pedantic word
against you; let them talk --- they'll never see
or, blindly, feel what you afford:
a priceless truth beneath a thin veneer.
Incomplex, clear, manageable, and clean;
you, non-idealized and lying near,
are like the timbre of a tambourine.
No more rhapsodizing --- lie slowly down ---
be calm tonight; forget this specious town.

An evening comes wading through the clouds
crimson the feet wet in mists unfurling

silences whisper hushed in shadows and leafless
stalks, tangled hair, moist in the mellow winds
foreboding the hour when minnows sleep

it will rain tonight
                   soft on the lotus ponds
landing by the dancing canvas leaves
                   painted in hues of cream-white
                            birthing buds of pink
                                     smiling shy

robed in the regal hues of the moon
blushing behind the mourning palms
painted against the skies
solemn

whirling, whirling like a dervish

it is the hymn of the skies
it is the early moon
it is the late koel
the pond overflowing
in longing


I will swoon rhapsodizing

Saying your name in syllables
whirling, I rise levitating
You are there in the distance
You are here by my side

Rhapsodizing at
The end of my allotted
Four hours of sleep
Finally, my exhaustion
Gives way to
A strange,
Happy,
Manic Phase

I love that you
Are moved by
My sadness,
The tension
That spirals
Into madness,
Free entertainment
For my little
Audience

Are my tears
Pretty
When they fall
From my face
In the dim light?

Are my fears
Disturbing
When they spill
From my lips
Like an angry
River?

Am I
Somehow
More attractive
For my tragedy?

I can be
Your dangerous
Distant nightmare
If you promise
To fetishize it
From time to time