What is this pull you have on me, this light, this love?
If it be love then why does it pull me under and into myself, into the places I dare not go?
If it be love then why are there whispers of danger and want and this tumultuous need?
Are you not in essence a highlighter upon my soul, gliding up and down, without touching, and pouring your paint upon me, until I glisten in flaw and uncertainty?
Can you not see my every crevice as you probe without probing and move without moving, entering me without entrance?
I see you there, inside of me, watching, speaking of my ways. I see you there pointing, excavating, moving, and withdrawing. You take without taking, your pursed lips open and filled with what was once my shadow. You suck up this substance I carry, removing without effort.
And I freely give, though I quake and tremble, attempting to hide the part of me you find.
How can I be, how can I stand, how can I breathe, without you entering and devouring my form?
For since I first set eyes upon you, you found my window, your door, the way into the places I so diligently hid and wiped clean. And yet you linger there, this ghost hovering above my edges.
To touch, you not dare. To make your presence known is not goal. For you will not declare your coming. You will not admit you linger inside of me. You will not venture where your own spirit dwells.
I have been your habitat for ages, your dwelling place, your hovel, your home. I am like the sun to you, the river that carries fish, the pond that spins cycle upon cycle of life.
Yes, as I am your child; though you be my shadow, my existence, my longing, my love; the string of my heart you pull, some master to me, some unspoken controller of my wishes’ dreams.
For in the deepest slumbering of my spirit you find me, though invisible you remain, stirring me and moving me to cause, clinging to me without touch, jostling me without motion, tracing your fingers around my echo.
I call out to you with each coming hour, my seconds not enough time to hold you; for you come and go beyond the reasoning of measurement. You are separate but you have taken me, and in the taking I am neither whole nor complete, but missing more than ever before.
You are the first step, the first move in the first square of a game of kings and queens. I am this pawn, chiseled of marble and set upon the trail and left, just left in stillness to ponder.
And how I long to move myself, but still remain a prisoner to your whim, a whim I know not and see not.
My ground you have shifted, my mind you have rumbled, but tis my heart that you have taken, seized and left me to stare upon the endless moves that never come.
Had you not entered, had you not seen me, had you not found me, had you not grasped me, I would still be. I would still be me and not some wonderer searching for your very fingers. I would not be this lost ghost less person than invisibility.
But you did come into me, you did enter, and now the spirit in me cries out for more, for home, for destiny’s light, and yet you come not. You do not return. And I remain captive in this game of living, homeless, and more forsaken in self than in form.
For I am suffering in the madness of awakening, suffering at the source, where the snake springs eternal from my being, edging through like flame to fire.
I am rising, caravanning up inside self, this shapeless self, and aspiring to find you, to reach what feeds and starves all at once. The dichotomy a serpent phantom doubled.
I am this whisper, this dream, this mystery of yours, and you are not soldier that comes to rescue, but rather droplets of honey that seize my aura and slide around the outside of where the unreachable dances.
And here I am watching, my soul crying, my ache yearning, my insides turned out, exposed, tarnished, and layered with what can only be a love of ages untouched.
Am I not dying, am I not yet dead, death himself, so moved and crushed and open and free all in one pull of your tethered ways? Am I not tug boat reversed, mountain stream moving upward, cornerstone unmoved but revealing the caverns below?
Am I not mystery rubbed out, dried where I was once wet, pierced where I was once marked with a name I know not? Am I the falcon with beak plucked and removed and voice of angel replaced where cawing and nonsense once lived? Am I this bird plucked of feathers by a brilliance so undefinable that I ache for the worms of the earth beyond?
Feed me I scream with a voice that I do not know. Feed me I scream from the depth of my womb from the ache of my loins, shivering in the places you have awakened.
And yet I remain here, still, this virgin to your ways, whilst you remain the ever watcher, knowing I am here, but coming not to the rescue.
Shall I beg of you to leave then, or call upon you more? Shall I beg of you to take me or crawl upon my knees to the boundaries you proclaim upon me? Trapped I am left, between this world and next, branded by your beauty, untrained for this world, and unworthy for next.
What shall I do Lord, but to bleed out to you, to stone my own self to death, so that my leaking, my red, my mark shall shine out to you, so you will come again and carry me home.