(and with her foot
at anchor
teetering on the precipice of goodbye
the tear fed shallows of oblivion

she whispered
across the dusk bruised room

“and if I promise you now, my heart?”)

“to be enjoyed?
or
perhaps
to be endured?

you see
your beauty
so confined
to the divinely undefined
it besieges me

and by what I can only perceive to be
the tender most of cruelties
by what must be
some heartless misunderstanding
I find that within its inherent absences
of whom you will deny
to be the very architects of your magnificence
I somehow fit

as though I am hunted
by the flesh
that binds the carnal night eternal
at which your heart claws
with a beating howl
to be the one who dreams
from opposite its dim
in desperate answer of the freedom song
its writhing writ

but if all that which flowers here
only opens to the sun
simply to hold it there
and exchange in mutual caress
a kinship?

why then
do you
only open onto that
which starves you?

as though all of you
solely by implosion
seeks to bloom
toward my temperate
and undeserving glow.

and was it you?

who wittingly birthed
these here most vacuous vestiges
beneath my flesh
that persist unlived within me
solely for the silent
consummation
of your self apathy?

and if not?

if not this is not you
who subjects me
to this,
the very fondest of destructions?

and if not

if this is not you?
why then
must this most beautiful intimacy
be one of such sheer self extinction
perpetually at war against itself
as to remain unfound
by all but you?

so, I cannot say
what good would become become of us
if you promise me now your heart

because love
has rarely been my occupation
and yet
never have I toiled as such
for…

for anything but.”