[this is for her, as is everything else.]
oh, my siren, siren dear, i can't stop writing about you. and even if i'm not, i still do, because you're embedded in the drip of ink, the thin paper, everywhere between the lines and tethered to the margins.
if erato is the muse of love poetry, then you shall be the one of ardency, for your ocean blue eyes set me aflame and your touch sears my molten exterior. i yearn after you, because your fingertips tap meaning into my body and your morse code on my skin spells out a silent i love you.
who taught you to be a typewriter?
who taught you to beat a steady rhythm onto my back, shoulders, chest, and heart, with your keys dripping in golden liquid and marbled with rosé champagne and passion?
who taught you to change me?
you're inside my mind, smothering my thoughts, inside my heart, growing camellias in my ventricles, and i want to take the red string and sew our souls together, i want to watch it slip between us both.
and as it slips, i think, oh honey, you are art.
do you know what art is to me?
it's poetry. it's prose, it's music, it's rococo paintings and victorian dresses. it's lust, the human body, a cloud of admiral butterflies in a forget-me-not sky, it's the way your eyes glint when you laugh. art is chaos, art is cataclysmic, art is cathartic, art is your honeysuckle touch that erases all dolour.
your lucent love runs through my ichor, and you are my abode as well as my escape, my rowan dear.
i become impuissant upon your caress, and your heartbeats have grown to be mine, your breath is mine and your love, as well. you're all those love letters i've dreamed of writing one day, you're my veritas and virtue.
but most of all, you are my raison d'être.
oh dear, just what have i done to get to you? you aren't from this world, so i've fallen for an angel incarnate, and i don't regret a single second, nor will i ever. it's quite impossible, and yet it happened; yet i've run across someone like you when i thought i couldn't feel love anymore.
i have plucked the thorned roses off me that served as a crown around my neck, a mere elegant noose to betray the sight of others, roses that i burnt to ashes; i have travelled across the sea and the countryside to meet you; i have tripped over sticks and stones and broken my bones but you have mended me.
your lips taste as sweet as the forbidden fruit of paradise, so i can't stop myself from taking another bite. i lay down on the grass and remain silent as your waves wash over me. i stare up into the black and blue sky, think of how much it looks like bruises and then you brush over mine. i've fallen before. for a good book, a scenery, a cherry tree petal, the most indistinct things one can imagine, but never have i fallen as hard as i have for you, and never have i felt as complete. meanwhile, stars fall, raindrops fall, snowflakes, blossoms, tides, shadows, time and the sun do, and they all find their end, they all reach something, yet i never do, and i never want to.
people say things. they say it's a sin and insist on god, they say it's ephemeral, they say "they're just teens" and mourn over their past love in the same instant. for me, it's neither sin nor ephemeral nor transitory, it is anything but sempiternal. what else can it be when you unravel me, tell me how to love myself by plucking on my heartstrings like terpsichore does on her lyre, and drag your firefly lips down my porcelain body stained with golden metal. what else can it be if not heaven?
in your presence, i take the melted sunlight and twine it into a flower crown dripping with aurum and silver daisies i picked up for you. in your wake, i stay by your side and thread my fingers through yours like the string not even atropos manages to cut. and if the world ended, we wouldn't. i'd carry these stones and rocks and build a house by the sea, i'd look after the meagre leftovers of flowers growing and pushing between the cracks of broken concrete and glass, i'd tend to them each day to see your strawberry soda smile.
i ask why do you love me? as you pick my heart apart like paper maché with a cherry smile on your lips, you kiss each fragmented part there is because you've mended me. and you brush over my veins and my atrium like something sacred, you say why? and touch my pink tulip cheeks, because you're you. oh, all those dead poets that killed love, they've never encountered you, for you're la dolce vita, but they never had you and so they were laid down into the cold dark earth. what life is worth living without you in it, i wonder?
alfred tennyson once said, tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, and i think that's not true. he didn't think of that third alternative people brush off as the notions of hopeless romantics and wildflower girls, the third being to love and be loved back is making everything pale in comparison; to be certain you're always going to lose something, anything, but never the one you are with is the most soothing knowledge there is.
it's tonight where i'm set alight and my fingers weave calico-coloured wishes onto your hair, where a kiss on my neck is like gasoline to my fire, where you're tracing my aureate skin and write hushed poetry on my frame. it's tonight where i've infused my blood with cosmic dust, laced molten stars into my tresses and took planetery constellations to hide in my pockets to show you the whole universe in the blink of an eye.
[this is for her, as is everything else.]
you're so good to me.
[everything everything everything.]
i love you, golden wildflower girl.
⚜
dedicated to the love of my life, as is everything else in this book .
[19 03 20]
