The Alchemy of Us — a poem

We built our love in a crucible,
Molten, spitting, too hot to hold.
You, the alchemist, spoke of stars,
Turning my words to lead
With greedy fingers,
Probing my desires as they shone,
Spread on the table upon which you worked.
How carefully you weighed my silences,
Sifting, shifting, discarding the glitter,
Rejecting all your lens saw, none.
A fool’s gold errand,
A failing Jung.

I was your cipher, your locked chest,
Yet I stood bare before you,
Hands open, throat exposed.
Still, you searched for riddles
In the marrow of my bones,
Played tunes on ribs that held their beating.
You feared my pulse, its erratic rhythm,
Because it told a tale
Beyond your hearing,
Drowned by words from prized philosophers.
I wasn’t to be seen, but to be studied,
A broken child, a white dress, muddied.

You lived in mirrors,
In smoke and sunlight warped by glass,
A beautiful playwright.
Your truths were theories,
Your wounds, myths worn smooth.
“Over it,” you said, and I was moved,
Until I touched a part so bruised.
You lashed out in cries that
Broke the stalemate, shook foundations,
And formed the crater.
The cracks showed slowly,
Then larger and greater.

I learned in cracking
The weight of your silences,
How they pressed against my ribs,
A bird held too tight,
Fragile bones breaking within me.
An absence of day, a murder of night.
You vanished, control,
A hand on a faucet,
The drip of intimacy measured.
A half-open closet,
Door ajar as if I was still welcome,
But the stairs were now slippery weapons.

There were moments of beauty,
Your words like velvet ropes,
Binding me to the softest of lies.
Through the words you spoke,
You told tales of destiny with a prophet’s dark voice,
But your gospel was empty,
Screams of white noise.
A map without terrain,
I followed it into the wilderness,
Where nothing grew.
But I searched for tenderness.

While you named me cold,
A baptism of piety, renamed by a vision
Of the person you could be.
You named me a locked box, a ghost in steel,
Yet I was flame,
Bright, consuming, real.
Too raw for your hands to hold,
Too open for your anchors.
It wasn’t my walls you faced,
It was the glittering surface
Of icebergs so formed
In a grown man’s circus.

Now, I unweave the threads you spun,
Pull the gold from the dross.
I see you, my love,
The boy behind the man,
The shadow behind the light.
You sought a savior,
Became the white knight,
Armor of iron and clamoring steel,
Fighting his reflection,
Thinking it’s real.
I was only a witness to the pain that you feel.

Let the fire cool, the crucible crack.
I will not carry the ashes of us back.
A stranger and more beautiful man I’ve never known.
I shall carry the burden of my beauty alone.
Your name dissolves in my mouth,
Your touch fades from my skin.
I take the breath, groaning
Under the weight of my love,
And turn my face to the wind,
To the raw, unbroken air,
Where I will breathe again,
Where I may finally find you there.