You are like music upon music upon music to me, a figure seemingly out of tune.

At times I think if I could only find your one song, the part that is truly you, then I could play you over and over, and dance, whether alone or together, in endless ecstasy.

Even as I tell myself you are complexity and spiraled wonder, I long to unravel you to thy very core—perhaps as some vegetable with heart or some flower with first petal.

I like to pretend you are easy to find, to see, to paint. For with easiness would come the grace of painting you into the shadowed corner of my existence: a mural to keep me safe, a walking space that requires no effort but touch. One finger slipped onto the wall of me and slid across your slivered silhouette.

For it is in my shadowed times, I cry out for you, for oneness for connection, for acknowledgment that I am as beauty. Only because you are as beauty.

Though it is in my days of sunshine, I too call out from the depths of me, reaching in silent gratitude and shimmering in your brilliance. It is then you are effervescent glory to behold. A gift set amongst a fleet of angels, with the finest and most demur of sails.

I have carved you within my soul light. Sat up constant night awake in my dreary state, counting you as one in youth beholds her sheep. You leap across my chamber ceiling as ghost set free in crimson carriage, bouncing through the valley of my imagination; your face bare except your kaleidoscope eyes. A barren tunnel of absence entering a rainbow of stars. I see there into myself and breathe. My last glance of this world, the beckoning of your substance.

Awoken, the days come, with the joys and woes of worldly possessions explored and dried, withered and left for the illusion of promise they be. Awoken, the days come, with the sorrows and gratitudes, the biting into what was once ripe to find the taste of expiration and abandoned. Still the bell chimes, in memory of laughter, and in preparation for the surprises beneath my pillow. I harbor such secret dreams and cherished gifts. And to share them, I set you upon my shelf of butterflies, and sing only to you, of the time of my happiness.

You are to me the mystery of fantasy, the puppeteer with magical strings of grandeur, capable of contorting a stage of delight or drama of doom. I hone in on what could be called your goodness, and try to trap your substance in my tiny womb, to bathe you in the babe’s cocoon with my essence. Yet, my attempts are futile.

For you are not but one form, not but one song, but an orchestra drawn out into a long and distant parade.  I cannot keep you, as beekeeper keeps bees. And so it is, that even in the ward of captive thought, your honey I cannot taste.

For you are the food to the masses; a delicacy set before the king of kings, royalty in your very blood and bones, built up and made into something I cannot decipher or replicate. You are magnificent splendor set upon the eye of my mind, and I ride you, this child of the merry-go-round world, upon a horse ever-changing.

Together, we are endless circle. Our destiny unreachable. Until spinning top stops, and I am flung out of your land, into the stillness, and made to watch alone, your partner for eternity wavering outside and beyond the mystical music of you.

~ Samantha Craft, November 2012