i would squander the first spectacularly
i'd become an itinerant thing
salt skinned, ferrous hearted,
sleeping in train stations with constellations
trapped beneath my fingernails
i would let strange cities
i would kiss people whose names
before dawn had the chance
the second life, i'd make myself a martyr
something built exclusively for ruin
i'd march toward catastrophe with my sternum split open like a hymn
letting glory cannibalize me
there is a particular seduction
in being destroyed for a cause
i think i would surrender to it gladly
the third, i'd live it as a poet
which is only another species of self annihilation
i would write verses so hemorrhagic
they stained the hands of anyone who touched them
and divine dissatisfaction.
id love impossible people with ecclesiastical intensity
i would mistake suffering for profundity
and call every breakdown transcendence
the fourth life, i'd be monstrous
not in the cinematic sense
i mean genuinely unbearable
i would weaponize tenderness
i would kiss with my teeth
i would leave claw marks inside everyone kind enough to try loving me
some lives are consumed by grief before they even begin,
and grief has an appetite.
the fifth, i'd choose obscurity
a little house somewhere rain-drowned and half-forgotten.
i'd learn the sacramental silence of ordinary devotion
soup simmering on the stove,
laundry perfumed with lavender,
someone murmuring my name not out of desperation but habit
perhaps that life would wound me most of all
there is nothing more terrifying than peace when you were raised on emotional arson
the sixth life, i think, i would spend searching for you.
through every face that almost resembled yours in poor lighting
i have the terrible suspicion
that every incarnation of me was always orbiting every incarnation of you
as though the universe itself had mistaken our devastation for destiny
the seventh life, i would finally find you
and you would be catastrophic
you'd arrive carrying your own weather system
your own famines, your own wreckage, your own exquisitely sharpened silences
i would love you immediately and against all biological instinct,
must love the sea despite knowing exactly what it does to them
intimacy can resemble vivisection.
that to be adored by another person is
to be slowly consumed alive.
we would ruin each other with almost religious commitment
the eighth life would be spent surviving
rooms still fragrant with your absence
the humiliating archaeology of heartbreak
receipts, photographs, strands of your hair caught in sweater seams like relics
i would become fluent in longing
i would carry your ghost beneath my tongue until even my prayers began sounding like your name
the ninth life, i would return to you
not because you were good.
not because we were gentle with one another
but because after eight lifetimes of running, destroying resurrecting, yearning
i would finally understand that some loves are not meant to save you
some loves arrive as apocalypses
they level you to the foundation
until there is nothing left but the most naked, incurable part of yourself
and i would meet you there
our bodies fragile as burnt paper
your hands trembling against my jaw while evening gathered soft and blue around us.
i would forgive you for every cruelty
every time you loved me with one foot already facing the exit
not because forgiveness was deserved
but because my love for you had long since evolved beyond morality
something capable of surviving extinction events
and when death finally came to collect us
patient as winter at the foot of the bed
i would curl my ruined body around yours one final time
there is the terrible privilege of having loved someone enough
to spend every single life becoming undone by them.