I feel you in me, like a trigger to my heart. That stopping point when breath is taken away by something beyond someone, and the beating of one’s thoughts stop in the silence of the lingering moment.
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I hear you and see you, in the varying degrees of your absence, your presence stolen by the invisible fear of connection. I hear you again, tapping upon our unioned cage, forged by blindness that carries out the parts two, feather by feather.
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I peck away at what should be hand, so moves the phantom through the absence of bars. I flutter, my wings upon the wooden stand, swollen from the inside, a child within begging to come out; my chest an eruption, proud and proper, a dove out of reach but swooning with hope.
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How I wish you could touch me here, where feathers attach to the skin of my riches, delicate and gathered in tender gentleness. Where the air sweeps beneath and tangles in sunlight’s whispers.
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You long to fly; I feel this spoken through your tears. To leap out of the shell without knowledge, to plunge into this something you call me. I feel you awake and sense the part of you that sleeps, the forever part that is both lost and stolen, still calling to be found.
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And I approach, my fingers claws, nestling my substance against the shadow of you. For only shadow lives where you breathe, only the coldness of forgotten, and the echo of the song I knew.
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Distance swings upon my perch, collected into a cluster of rainbow’s weeping, each droplet multi-dimensional and dripping into the canvas of you. A pictorial representation of denial fried in the pan of reason.
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Whisper to me not, I say, as your words are no more truth than the broken past you have assembled as false reality claimed true. For I have the vision of the hawk, the seeing of the owl, the knowing of the ravens’ ancestral song.
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In bitter sworded-ache, I cast out the doubt of illusion and dig with claw and beak as one, joined in ballad, two forms merged in the impossibility of rhythm and depth; stifled by the emptiness beyond.
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In yearning, I create nests of safe harbor, a place to lay both your bosom and your head, so heart may speak as river’s brother to the mind you claim as yours.
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And you stir, some secret doorway set ajar, to let the fleeting flutter of wisdom move within. And words soothe, as the truth of the long-awaited lullaby rises, like some star that has at last died to please my wishing.
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“Speak my desert heart”, you whisper, guiding me in warmth to the place of my wanting. And from there, in the magic of vision birthed into solidity, we merge as golden one. The phoenix twice-created, so dreams may fall upon the dreamers whilst we soar.
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“Speak, my desert soul, to the ache in me,” you beckon, further chanting: “Once buried, bring me forward to the weaver of love; the soul whom waits on the edge of tomorrow, pleading out cause, slumbering gateway awaiting joy.”
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And then as waterfall filled by cycle of giving skies to swallowed lands, you pour out: “Call out to me, as flight, wide and thick, in the gloriousness of freedom. Glide me to the stream of trust, to faith, to the place where I can see and I cannot. Don on me the wisdom of knowing all is not and not is all. Take me to the pool of nothingness and emerge me ripened as ink transferred into artist’s hero.
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Tall, black, stifled not by life, but by the drive to force my presence into pages, make me the one who moves the tides, who ruptures the ground, who splits open the edges of her existence and nestles between the hot molten desire. Make me the one who champions without reason. Who knows not why he moves, except instructed to do so by feathered shaking quill.
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Paint me, make me, create me, a thousand times more, in scene after scene, script after script. Pierce me with the markings of a master, shield me with the pen of making, so I might have no will but to cast out all doubt of my existence.
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Bleed me to the world on the white parchment of forever, made of the trees of the ages, and the dark petals crushed within. Exist me into existence, so I may eat away, as one eaten away, leaving me twisted and forgotten, unfamiliar with my own being.
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Recreate the passion that lives. Recreate the talisman-warrior, so I may go out into the world and feed the masses in my unified glory with one.
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I see now, the ever-present yearning to find self in the reflection of me. I see there behind and beyond my shoulder broad, feeding not from me, as much as from the memory of where I stood.
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How we have waited and wandered, in the broken thoughts of mind, only to find again and again, some sunlight forgotten, some moonshine tucked away beneath where treasures go.
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I call on you from the shattered place of reason, where the shed of light escapes inward, and for the moment I am there one made two. I call on you to break open and carve your name across my chest. So I may rise as victim removed and dance on the gravestone that was once my home.
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To rise, from beyond this dirt of flesh, no less formed than unformed, no less determined than undetermined, but much released from the agony that was once me. Given to her, as her to me, both as slave unchained to freedom. Given as wolves set out of cave. And run we do, to where we stand, our cages unemptied, as are shadow selves rest upon the time of flight.”