ascetic

published in my 2nd book, TRAVERSALS

i am standing in front of your house again. walking like an ascetic with no shoes. i hope you see me. i hope you don’t see me. this game we play, always bound to lose.. here, take these flowers from the heart of me. twisting in the light, you grew between bones and singed me like sun from the pavement against my heels. i could not have predicted you. the garden is dead but still i sit.. when, when will i stop writing about you? when will i stop weeping over mirrors i shattered with my own hands, wrestling for a glimpse of you? when will i stop looking? when will i constrict this feeling of force in my limbs, pin them down, make like wave pounding on shore, exploding – into nothing? i have done all this for you. it is my heart, my decision, that leaves us cleaved, standing at edges of the chasm, praying we slip; god, it would be so much better – than this. nursing the heart that splits eternal, the flowers that won’t stop growing, writhing on the grass before the headstone we were never buried under. an empty grave. nowhere to mourn.. plants plucked and plucked out of my heart, the twists of bone. my arms were made to knot around you like gnarled trunks, like lovers in the eruption’s wake – inextricable. even when you can’t hear me, i am calling for you. broken off from the universe, i am rooted to this spot. i can’t move, i can’t send one more song of my soul through the silence.. but i will not stop walking until i find you, rest my head against your shoulder – and turn back into the earth. maybe every expanse we traversed was a glimpse into the future – the two of us, existing as we could not find a way to in body, in blood, imperfect.. us – our haunting, the echoes – fingers perpetually stretched but never reaching.. us – turned mountain, turned grass, turned sky, turned sea.