#myloveishigher

[thefinishpiece]

My Love Is Higher

The appearance of my love is a star. Exploding in the dark. Until only shadowed dust remains.

My love is higher. Too high to see.

I inhale you—deep and longing. The longing is too much. It is causing me apart. There are so many spikes within my heart. I cannot stand when we belong to the same shard—it paralyzes me.

My love is deep. So deep it hurts.

All the peaks, all the stars, all the realms. From everything above to everything below. Side to side. Within and without. Together and apart. The troubles of gods; the qualms of aliens. From the linguistics of force and quantity, to the language of demise and infinity. The inevitable.

My love is higher than yours. You will see.

I see you. Out in that world of yours. Spinning around the questions they ask—what makes me think you would listen to me? On your toes, you’re looking every direction but mine. Yet, in your eyes I notice the tilting reflection of a loneliness beyond. You want to let someone in; but you do not know who. It could be me—why do I think it would be me?

It will never be me.

My love adores you. But it mourns me.

A glass tongue shatters on my lips, cutting corners from my mouth, blood and bits. Whenever I try to speak to you, my voice is taken away it seems. In canyons far away—where vultures screech more sensibly than me. When you come near, my orbit goes awry. Planets fall from every side, ricocheting off the stars. How could such little things be so hard? I should not care, but then again, I should not be anywhere near your space. I do not want to ruin your heaven.

I ruin everything.

My love idolizes you. But it defeats me.

In the hallowed shallows of shadowed halls, a place of holiness and above, I build your face. In shiny stone and jewels plucked from the cores of earth, I wrap the elements to develop the pose of which all shall know you. I recreate the delicate points of your shape, from the tender tips of your swallowing cheeks, to the nose that twinkles when you grin. The articulate deepness of your eyes, lashes so perfectly astride, with irises the color of martian skies. But it is not tender enough; it lacks the glow. All it takes is a single crack and my idol collapses into a puddle of ash and smoke.

I cannot make anything worth anything.

My love worships you. But it breaks me.

Sometimes you are so clear to me. A transparent vision of the other side of infinity. I can see within your translucent frame, your gnashing tubes and webbed veins. Your organs doused in fluid, constricting and expanding to a rhythm without a metronome. Squirting tiny specks of heat and joy, the body slurps it up and more—everything grows. Everything knows where it goes. Where do I belong in there? I peek into the dungeons of heart—peeling back the gates, guts spewing out. The leftover remains of forgotten hopes and dreams. On the floor beneath the room where I thought I should be, I do not see anything. It is all empty. All belongs to you.

I belong to nothing.

My love deserves you. But I do not deserve love.

Do you even notice me? When you are caught in my gaze, do you know how you make me feel? The sight of you makes my body constrict and swallow itself. I can’t stay stable around you. My heart implodes and the organs in my cavities push so much they rip and tear and swell into blistered faces, spewing spit and blood in vain desperation to capture just a single breath. But there is no breath. Not when you are around. My throat enflames. My head dizzies. My whole vision blurs. I am so dizzy, I will trip over every thought that passes, or every moment that continues, until you are gone and away. Even then, you remain stuck in my imagination, as if you were really there, the mere appearance of you smearing my stability in to a paralytic seizure. I cannot imagine talking to you. If I did, what would I say? I might say nothing. Or I might say some garbled shrieking that is only reminiscent of speaking in the sense that my lips are physically mobile, but the sounds are discordant dystopia. I might spit on you. Snot might drip out from my nose. Saliva might leak on the side of my lip. I get so dry around you. The air is suffused by your heat—your conflagrating attractiveness. And you are attractive. Not just because I love you, but you are attractive to everyone else I imagine. All to the detriment of my pursuit.

I do not think I will ever catch you.

My love devours you. But it cripples me.

I am afraid of losing you to the coyotes and vultures. To the scavengers with their shallow skin and nervous appetite. They do not desire you for you—not for your person, your being, your affectation, your composite of atoms that makes you up, your inimitable quantum frame that is the same lustrous beauty no matter where in the universe you are, or where in time you go, or whatever the circumstances of which you should be put somewhere, for it does not matter, you are the same glorious deity in all dimensions—they desire to consume your flesh and lick your bones and leave the remnants to dissolve away in the desert of abandonment. They want to make a feast of you—I want to make a symphony. A rising tide of lushness, of melody, curving into bends, loops of technical marvel, as if imitating the structural mathematics of physical forces, gravity converted to lucid harmonies, plucked strings, choirs of molten voices creating suns as they sing, shining in darkness like luminous eyes on a lustrid spider. If you have ever seen the interloping folds of time and space, dimension within dimension within dimension, the endless quantum coils that form the appearance of reality; if you have ever seen reality cast into cascades, across voids and fades, the fractal grid of physical existence, the architecture of the universe—if you have ever seen these things, then you know what exists in your eyes. And these scavengers would pick their teeth with every line and vector and vortex, digest these cosmicalities into excrement, then move on to their next lesser victim. They do not distinguish between gods and goats—they eat them all with the same hollow satisfaction, the same meaningless hunger. That is not love—so why do they even try? And I am afraid you may be cornered by them. Surrounded by their neurotic hunger. I fear such a scenario. It is impossible to know if you would choose me over them. I keep waiting for a sign from you, but I do not receive anything. You seem elated to speak to the wolves. You smile and twirl for them while continuing to ignore me. My conducting hand falls, my orchestra becomes silent. I see now there will be no crescendo of forces. No passionate physics to be recreated. No design to be revealed. How long can I watch you share attention with wolves before I surrender the hunt?

I do not have the strength to fight them.

My love is a spectator sport.

If only you acknowledged me. Or maybe you do. It is difficult to discern the implications of human ceremony. The forced and cyclical habits we conform to—we obey. Such as three times now, you may have grinned at me. In a passing glance. But is it politeness? I bet you smile at everyone. Strangers. Stalkers. Savages. Are you just being polite? When the scavengers approach you, you smile and laugh with them—or is it at them? Perhaps you’re only amusing them? But do you want me to approach you? I must admit, I am a perishable coward. I do not know if I have the spine to go to you and say to you these things, thoughts, emotions, opinions—to share my portion of the human condition with yours, hoping the two shall intertwine and form the veritable identity of humanity, and then we will send it across the stars through the edgeless scapes of discovery. Ascension. Transcendence. Or maybe just hello. I will disappoint you. I will not provide anything of value to you. I am just an admirer. A voyeur. An astrologist peering through a telescope into the soul, viewing clusters of miraculous being and divine shores, constellations of heavens, never being able to touch these celestial beaches—never able to hold in ny hands the purest sand, fine and crystalline, slipping through my fingers with the smoothness of hours through a day. I will never know. And I, too, will never know what it is to touch your love and have it touch me. You are smoldering. If we could dance, move in sequence and symmetry, we would undo the heavens above and hells below, and all earths and suns between, the whole portrait of the cosmos spiraling out in tangent volts; the wheel of time, spinning, spinning, spinning, stopped. And when we finally stop, our feet stomped, our chests heaving, panting, ceasing—the universe will have its heat death, and we will have our love. It will keep us together when everything else is vanishing. If only you knew how we could dance. And be in love. Be with me. I would invent languages for you. New ways of describing your beauty. I would devise equations of you. To explain the material of your beauty. There would be new elements, new forces, new modes of consciousness; I would remake the entire vale of knowledge, reshape it in your form, redo the universe as if it only belonged to you—if it does not already. It seems so. So unreal. It will never be. Because you will never love me. Why should you? I am less than dust. I am not even the shadows on the edge of your light. I am worse. I am sinking in the abyss. Deeper and deeper into insignificant existence. Until even the tiniest particles laugh at me. The only grace I shall save is the memory of you—and I will make each remembrance feel like an eternity.

So goes my grace.

My love is doubtful. But not of you.

Shall I compare you to the mysteries of the universe? You are sound. Bending. Curving. Waning. Constantly dying. Perpetually fading. The way every note exists for only as long as it is a note, then it disappears into the ether. A fiber in a patchwork behemoth. You are vibration. Curling. Waving. Bounding. Leaping to and fro, across spatial scenes, across fields of intrepid distance, across intimate bounds, the close stitches in a patchwork atom, or as far out as the untouchable edges of opposite galaxies, spanning across every conceivable possibility and every possible conception, more infinite than infinite itself—you are vibrating through everything. Everything pulls in and pushes out with you. Your every breath is a pulse of life, of the universe, of soul—you are the elysian ring, repeating circles throughout the graves of gods, of creators and destroyers, of whatever it was before it all began and whatever it will be after it is all over. In the blank disposition, in the realm of nothingness, in the prison of that eternal white slate, there is no feeling or thinking or seeing—but you will hear a gulp inside you, one last pulse and then you are gone forever. And not just gone, but entirely away. Totally without being. Being anything or anywhere. No anytime. And yet, there you are, the sound of whatever it is keeping this whole thing going. I do not believe in a god. But I do believe in you and your music, which is the only reason any of this exists in the first place. To give meaning to music. To conceive of what music is. So that when I hear you, I will know I am being blessed by the voice of the void. You have been given life for this sole purpose. And now you have achieved it. You have come full-circle. And you—cosmic siren you are—could lead me into a black hole and I would not care or be concerned. I would cease for you. If you asked me to. You should ask me. But I cannot make demands of you. I want to share with you. Share a meal. Share a planet. Share a lifetime. Share a secret—the most internal, deep, profoundly affecting secret. I want to be a part of you. Be your eyes. Be your lips. Be your hair. Your fingernails—I really don’t care. Any piece or fragment of you is enough because you are so imbued with wonder and perfection, even a speck of crud behind your ears is worth spending an endless vacation being there. Any part of you is a home for me.

What do you hear when you listen to yourself?

My love is deafening.

You are light. Crippling light. Blinding. Burning. Fearsome. A cold burst, slashing onto the spectrum of sight, icy and lucid. Lines of you everywhere. Spotted snowflakes of shimmers, slicing their way through every side and corner. Shadows move from space, shoved from their home by wherever the randomness of your luminosity chooses to go. A spectral plume. You are magma within a darkened cave, your shine molten and makeshift. But powerful. Ancient. Dissolving. Melting. You are the first light of life and the new light after death. You are golden steam. You are glimmering breeze. You are an eruption of colors and cadences. Your frequency is lashing and lucid. All darkness is scorned by you. You are ethereal as you pass through barriers and spaces, expanding across the whole universe effortlessly, traveling at a speed all your own, harnessing the hue of energy and reflecting your shade off every conceivable object that has been conceived. And in the future, too, you extend, dangling your dazzling rays in flirtatious dimensions, peeking between past and present, between what is and what is not, between the ceaseless born and dying, through the holes of time and out the other side in unfazed ferocity, still gleaming and glowing like the heart of Zeus. Rip it out and eat it. Your light—you are light—tints the universe in your palette, rather playfully, as if you aren’t even trying. It just emanates from you so naturally, like the universe was created for the precise purpose of providing you a canvas upon which to bleed your light. And just like light, you are there one moment, but the next flash —

Gone. Never around my ugly shadow.

My love is blinding.

I’m higher than space now. Floating up there, in an above beyond scope, a place so high it is bending from frame and folding into itself like a galaxy collapsing. So far from fire I can see no smoke; so far from light I can see no shadow. There is only me, I, myself—whatever you prefer, though I know you prefer nothing, absolutely nothing, because if you had a preference I wouldn’t be here. I’d be with you. Or I wouldn’t be alone at least. I’d have you here with me. We could float together, hand in hand, drifting along our own daydream. We could be the clouds in each other’s skies, the petals on each other’s flowers, the mountains on each other’s planets. All of that as a simple, imaginary space to us, up here, so high we are ascension, we are seraph in sex and sound and soul. We are angels, full of magnificent wings, lustrous and lucent and feathery like the lashes of a star. We may never come down—we should never come down. We should be architecture. Things should be built within us and around us. Our design should evoke an era, the era of us, that the time we spend together should startle the ages, shall pulse throughout the momentum of the universe, so potent until we strike heat death itself, twisting our bone flame blade through void heart and bleed another big bang god to crawl from its remains and vomit the universe once more. That we should be eldritch and eternal and elegiac. That we should be more ancient than spirits and gases and thoughts. O, let us be that dust between webs, that hanging and ethereal phantom of passages and passing time and passed through worlds. Divine us, and we shall be the matter, energy, force. O—so many things we could be! But you have forsaken us. I am so high now I cannot even know you. I’ve lost touch with body, form. I—is it still an I?—higher than god now. I can see the celestial throne. There is a kingdom beneath me, that of a heaven, of one and many elysian places, draped in vines that never cease growing, and clouds of gold that cry a crystal rain so pure it shatters on the air. Angels sing to me, a whole choir of eyes and rings, emitting in their voices a ballad of two lovers split apart and the universe that forms in the space between them. There is all the passion, longing, desire, heartbreak, pain, envy, hatred, suffering—all of it of all the mortal and non-mortal things, echoing to me. I can feel the vibration of every atom; the breath of every living thing. Flesh is like clay in my hands. I turn water to blood and blood to life. Flowers bloom. Babes are born. But I can take them, just as easily, and turn them to rot. I can peel the skin by a whisper, and deprive the seas with a flick. I can fell galaxies at will, crumble them into less than ash, roll up the world into a ball of decay, crush it no different than crushing a blade of grass. Let me burn this garden in glorious flames until all that is left is my own sadistic joy. Destroy everything, laughing, pleasuring, rending it by claws unimaginable, tearing in directions of nightmarish geometry that your brain would coagulate itself just trying to hold a concept of. End, let it be, end to all things—until I am alone. Alone. High I have gone—so high I am truly alone. Nothing else is near me. Not even myself. And as I fade, I believe I see a memory of you.

O, let it be that I see you as the last thing!

Your love is higher than mine.