beckoning

There is no air from where I call you, no breath to sip or waste. My voice has long since left with the tide as your eyes ride the wave chopped moon. It is outside of time or instance, just a tingling on your neck, an itch that missed your skin. Every mood you shed rings out my forgotten name, alone in some soup of remembrance. Every day you wake tangled in my truth, a scent you forget from faith in sleeping. The dance continues in your crystal stillness. The dance we will forever wear, long after all flesh is lost.

And so I find you, restless in clean sheets. So I find you, fevered in a cool room. How your open eyes must paint those walls, how your sight flees out every window. The beading of the water as you turn off the shower. The gentle roughness of a towel, the brush meditating through your hair. A note written by skin in steam. The sudden invocation of surprised senses, the taste of citrus, the scent of wisteria. Those alibis and second thoughts that haunt the racket of a troubled world. The ease of your heart, slipping its way through that tangle of breath and blood. Your tongue pressed gently between your teeth. The world unwound as you have imbued it.

I speak from the ache of lapsed faith. I speak from the haunted places and the ruined schemes. You name is my anchor and my transit. It is the sound I live in between worlds and ways. It is the price of passage as all possibilities collapse. In this boundless observance I am only aimless direction. Nothing but the change of language into speech and speech into life. I would claim my place in this world in your mass of meat and bones. I would rend my wishes into your flesh, that burning kiss of ink and steel, all pain and blood and linger. My claim could only ever be a scar, that wish that extinguishes a flame. Your light forever a shining just short of the saying of your name.