Aesthete, you; nepenthe, you; you gorgonize
me. I sing you acosmism. I
realize you as an amaranthine metanoia.
I write to know your body
as anoesis, give of my flesh—
to understand what intimate vulnerability signifies.
I invoke my muse. Spend hours
chasing divine inspiration for the hope
that I can somehow grasp what
it means to realize the sharing
of personhood, of limited immortality. I
think on you, ponder you as
a nimbus of Being. You evoke the
aura and adroitness of great women—
how mighty Tumanguya stares down my
brilliant dreams—, imploring me to join
you orphic and humid, while you
tower taller still, filling my lungs
with blight oxygen, raging against this
body electric, glittering with lacy jags
around your nude and mature form
as instantiations of offering, instantiations of
syzygy. I see you becoming as
elusive prestidigitation, becoming as simulacrum. As
aperture: learnèd. Thus, your questions are
widowed. Life loses its petty gods.
And from across too few inches,
your gaze reminds me I chose
to witness this canon destruction yet
maintain the audacity to be jealous
of solitaire’s inevitability: that all games
are destined before they start. So
we Become to know our wyrd
coil and Greek fatalism. But to
know flesh like a crowned sparrow,
singing at skydown, I ask: Do
you judge what gab is sanctified,
you, no thief of things unreconciled?
I say: Give of your flesh.
I too will be candid; I
too will be not a bit
complicated. Breathe the oxygen you steal
from my lungs back into me.
I won’t pay for an unfilled
grave while wishing my being discrete,
distant from things against walls and
separate from a confluence of denouements.
I say: Some philosopher said we
come into being when observed. Well I
am observed, but this is different.
I am néanti and abschattungen; I
am dédoublement; I am reflet and
réflexion: I am a sum, dared
into an intimate dialectic. A Being.