lover boy, who knew you wouldn’t play toys just to destroy. there is a peculiar mercy in your hands, the kind that arrives without announcing itself. i look at you and think of untouched cathedrals, of rainwater gathering in the mouths of statues, of prayers forgotten for so long they begin to bloom moss. the fragility of your face feels ancient somehow, as though sorrow had visited you many times and still found itself unable to stay.
won’t you tell me all of your problems and we embrace. lay them before me like offerings. let me count every grief by its true name. i want the aching inheritance of your silence, the things that sit beneath your ribs like winter fruit refusing to rot. let me learn the geography of your wounds until they resemble constellations instead of scars.
say, are you my lover or my savior, for every wound becomes less painful in your favor. perhaps that is what frightens me. the way your presence rearranges the architecture of suffering. the way despair loosens its teeth whenever you speak. you arrive like a lantern carried through floodwater, and suddenly even ruin becomes beautiful enough to survive.
you hold me close and i see your face and all i can think of is prose. not poetry, not songs, but prose—long wandering paragraphs heavy with devotion. prose that drips from the ceiling of my mind like candle wax. prose that follows me through october gardens and sleepless moons. prose that cannot decide whether to worship you or simply remain astonished that someone so gentle exists at all. and if love is a language, then perhaps your face is the first page i have ever read without wanting to reach the end.