The Pull

On the train ride home from the poetry slam tonight - my first one in Germany - this poem demanded to be born. It arrived out of the absence that follows certain moments, when joy has nowhere to go because the one person you want to give it to is impossibly far away.

Here is to the ones continents away, but closer to the jugular.

This endless rite,
a holy war
of soul and will,

I rebel
against the tide
that is you.

With spells of reason,
I summon walls,
carve runes of forgetting
into the folds of my mind.

But one glance from you,
and I am dust again,

rising
to meet your storm.

Drunk on your essence,
I wander sleepless,
a ghost wearing my name.

Food withers on my tongue.
Time collapses.
The world dims
without you in it.

My soul
slips from the vessel of me,
a wisp of longing
riding windstreams
toward your breath.

How do you touch me
from so far away?

You travel through blood,
a sacred river
coursing toward the altar
of my bones.

Your presence:
a fire in the hollows,
a scent on the wind,
an echo that sings
in every silence.

I dissolve,
grateful,
into your pull,

abandoning kingdoms,
forsaking every road back,
for a single second
in your shadow.

*Image from tonight.