I am fragile as glass, fragile as silk.
You could but look at me
And I might crumble, a sculpture made of sugar.
And yet I have stripped away the layers of myself
Going on, always going on
Trusting you
To foolishness, to distraction, (to destruction?)

And I keep on shedding my disguises.
I keep tearing them down
Each after each and /oh!/
I am so small inside,
The universe pressed into a pebble
And trembling with its unresolved might.
And what if you touch me
And I shatter?
And what if you touch me
And find I'm not what you were hoping
You would hold in your palm?
(And what if
You recoil
And don't touch me at all?)

What if
My shivering gravity
Meets your soft light
And muddies it somehow, makes it less?

Sometimes I fear I am
Untouchable
By nature.
At once delicate
(the way a butterfly's wing will crumple and wilt
If your fingers touch it)
And devastating,
For there is so MUCH in here
So much that wants out.

So much that /bends/ toward you when you come too close
Like glass heated to smooth billows
Where once it was sharp and brittle
(and will be
Again.)
Don't you see?
You could take me in your hands and shape me,
Make me different forever,
And walk away to leave me cold and cutting again.
You could,
And I would leave such burns on your palms
And you would create
Such edges in me
Such fingerprints
Such caverns of space where the light gets in and won't leave, trapped and pressing and empty,
Unfillable.
You could do all of that.
And I could let you.
And I could let you close, knowing this
And... I /do/
I do and it amazes me.
I do, I tear off my many masks with eager hands
And smash them at your feet.
And I don't know
Why.

I move through the world
And I want to give
Like a soft rain.
Quiet and gentle,
Never demanding, never harsh, never desperate.
Like breathing
I want to give
And it falls over everything like a shimmering veil.
It is unhurried and strangely detached,
A love that floats lazily down to alight wherever it may.
Most of the time
My need to give is like that.
I have made it so.
But
Every so often I turn and see someone.
I trip and fall and quite by accident I SEE.
And suddenly it courses through me like lightning.
Suddenly the earth cannot accept the light that roots me to it,
Reaching its crackling fingers outward for ANYTHING that will survive its touch.
Unsatisfied and violent with motion, it doubles back and sears through me
Filling my veins with molten silver.
Do you know what it is to love something so completely
That if you were to ever touch it it would powder to ash in seconds
And everything you saw to love
Would catch the wind like cinders?
When I read as a child
That at the smallest level we never TRULY touch-
Our atoms repelling one another by magnetism-
I wept.
And I could still weep
For I have always known the excruciating sensation of "so close",
I was born of it
And the sobering understanding that to touch
Destroys.
Oil paintings, butterfly wings, tearstained cheeks-
My fingertips are weapons.
I have been kissed and thought,
"Unmake me."
I have loved so hard that,
Desperate,
I held my smoldering hands against my stomach,
Willing to burn to keep my arms from seeking purchase.
Oh, all hands are weapons!
And I have held them,
Felt the heat.
I have kissed palms,
Clutched them to my chest and tried to burn away the space
The maddening space
Between my skin and theirs.
If I had my way
If I knew I wouldn't leave equal scars
I would cover myself with the handprints of people I love,
Let them change me.
Let them make me.
I am gentle
Because inside I am chaos.
I am soft
Because inside I burn.
And every time I
Don't
Brush my fingers along the cheek of someone I worship,
I count it as an act
Of unutterable love,
To hold back such tender violence.

I am art.
I have made myself
Art.
Not just a creator of it
But the thing itself,
With all its mercurial strengths and flaws.
If I make my art
About you
I have made myself
About you.
It is the biggest, most secret gift
I ever give:
To love someone
Is to make them immortal.
It is to sing the song of their soul
To the best of my ability
Until the day I die.

Antigone, the heroine.
I am proud for you,
With your high cheekbones
And your straight spine
And your low, ringing voice.
I am proud for you,
With tears in my eyes-
"Antigone, the heroine,"
He said, holding an exquisite, strong-featured mask
With delicate fingers,
And I saw your face in its sharp lines,
And I thought,
"It's true.
How saved I feel,
Knowing you."

I can't make you anything beautiful enough.
Don't you understand?
I can't make something
Say something
Think something
That will speak of beauty the way you echo in my head.
That is what pushes me to the edge of madness late at night
And forces me to sit in stillness
Frozen by the idea that

No movement that could leave my bones in tact would possibly suffice,

No song that could escape without taking my lungs with it could match the tones that rip through my soul,

No art, painted with blood or dragged from the silver tangles of my mind, could glow with the pain and passion I feel
In reflection of you.

Don't you know that to see you, even glimpses,
Even fractures images,
Is a terrible, exquisite privilege
So present, so unbearably alkce, so vast that
It cannot be contained within a single, passionate soul like mine?
It is too enormous to be intimate
And far to close to be
Simply divine.
And I shake with it,
With the power of it and the helplessness it creates within me-
A craving, never sated,
To show you what you are.

I don't know when I started loving you.
I know when I realized
I could.
I knew when I first spoke with you that you
Were someone I could love
Devastatingly.
And since I have studiously looked past that knowledge,
Ignored it even though it sat beside me at the dinner table
And put its cold arms around my waist in bed.
I protected you from it,
Keeping it a ghost for as long as I possibly could,
Even as it gained substance at my side
Pulling at my sleeves and tangling its soft fingers in my hair--
"Look at me."
"No.
No I will not see you."
But one night, some night,
I must have been tired and weak,
I must have been raw
And, having heard another of your shocking tendernesses
Reaching through space to tug at my heart,
I must have turned
And seen it in full-
My loving you-
And since
I have been gorgonized, stone,
Unable to look away.

I fear you. I do.
I fear my fascination with you.
I pull away like the planets press against their rings around the sun,
Reaching for the stillness of the dark beyond
But bound by dazzling heat and light.
Sometimes I see my death in your eyes
Like a moth sees its immolation in the filaments of a lightbulb
But sacrifices life to be
For a moment
Finally warm.

I trust you
As much as one can trust something wild:
I understand
That to touch you might leave
Scars on my hands,
But I think that they would be scars
I would cherish in my later years
And trace among the creases of age
As proof that I had lived without regret.

It is not the heat I fear,
In truth
It is the cold.
It is the passing
Of something bright
Close beside me and then
Beyond
Off into the world
Where I may not follow.

It is the blindness that always comes
When I look away from a brilliant light
And am for a moment paralyzed
By the cold certainty that I will never see again:

I would leave you with something to remember me by,
Some love that refuses to fall away no matter the storm,
No matter the chaos of your fire.
Something quiet and constant
And more enduring than I am.

For

I fear not what you are
But what you aren't
Which, like black water,
Will rush in to fill the void
Once you have gone.