in the flash of silence and ever nights, i wish it was ours. that future, be it true – i will it so. every act forward is to return to you. time bends with every “i love you” charged over trench and burning ground.
Destruction as the cause of coming into being
armored and armed, i have fell cold beyond the depths of summer’s dying and heat to halt the sun. but nothing has turned my skin to flesh than the forgiveness of your touch. here, at the edge of our goodbye lives a wound whose linger is a rupturous totem. it is when i live – firm at point severed from time. the sureness of your tone is promise, one that shakes me as still as when i first received it.
we are further away than i could remember. i laugh remembering how you smiled at me every morning i frantically awoke passed alarm. you taught me to laugh, without reason – you offered joy. so far as i am now, i know how you felt when pain stopped you from speaking. so far as i am now, i know love and death realize the supposed other just the same, and are truly of one rite.
now i awake to shatters or full battalion calls. my name seems erased for use and title. however, i mourn not and never what i know lay in the love of your heart.
my stare fell still and unforgiving. i think of how i wished we captured more time like film sealing reflective light, but i know that which seems like a gap or missed step is the space unclaimed in which now i find you.
in the shadows of combat i have become close with another who calls me out of title. to him i am called “JM”, to which reply “R”. at times it is hard to tell what we may share in mind. he clenched the blade from his bayonet between his bared teeth, saying that those who see will think he marked the scars upon his own cheeks. there is something more than commands that order his heart, and i believe that is the reason we have come to speak out of terms.
we were out gathering plated names. one by one, with every reach to collect, my skin became cold. R called out towards me without looking, “JM, what’s at home to keep you this silent?”
i was shocked because i knew, he knew
i replied, “everything i every asked for”
“except this?,” he said.
“that, at home, is the total of my strength to bare this. Its weight, steady and living, are of a truth more solid than the earth itself. my heart has learned to beat so strong from that home i lift up and exalt heavier than any sword made by man.”
R was silent for a moment. with his eyes still forward and a slight smile sharpened by a steady working body he said, “you’ve stopped trembling. the cold means nothing to blood running and burning with love.”
i then saw your face clearest in a flash. the sky ignited with the rhythm of alarm and command to which we formed order.
Love that dare not speak its name
i collapse. the bend of my knees are taken by the total of gravity before any form that joy assembles into. it is nothing without you, and through the nothing that all things reveal i see truly and only you. ecstasy overcomes the all of my capacities as a virus forcing me to offer – offer it, myself – love, in all light. i am enflamed, and as soon as my wound is permitted to bleed, I feel the absence of full from giving.
its this absence that allows me to hold you. i think of the times you would tap me because i held you too tight, or even when my limbs would continue an automatic tapping in response to skin becoming flesh. you knew my excitement of loving you.
you are not here and my grip on reality reaches a point of tension edging on tears. i do not jump, into void, into the memory of you and wound because the same hands that once danced with the ecstasy of you, of we – together, now grip the hand of what i’m told is a weapon. It leads me over the top of this trench and into a hell. there is no hell as cold as distance from you.
my heart beats. you would tell me to do my best, and leave me with a kiss whose touch could penetrate any armor this life could forge. the weeks between letters become uncountable and the difference
between day and night – undetermined without the heaven of your smile.
R moved me with the butt of his weapon. this reminder’s gentle force communicated to me that he knew the edge of the trench meant more than battle, to me, as the solid stare of my face into the shadowed sun spoke of thoughts words dreamed to capture.
i began to seize, we began to charge.
Heavens final deception
I extended my hand. accepted and embraced, it felt as though we had lifted each other off the ground. R removed his mask and rubbed his eyes vigorously with filthy bandaged hands. my first instinct was to mirror in friendship, form, and habit but I caught myself just before touching my eyes with hands covered in a mixture foreign to my knowing. I remembered how you removed the edges of my collar tucked from my sweater because you didn’t know the style. I would jolt with a spot of laughter, with sense of how innocence and ignorance are made same in the beautiful light of love. you would ask me why I laughed, to which I would say “nothing.” on better days I would kiss your head or cheek, and seal the moment with a vowel of one of the little secrets I promised to keep until after we married. I
knew then why I love the look of mary, catherine, and angela with medieval eyes reaching behind beyond the comprehensions of sky – it was yours. what kingdoms I would give to again be by your side, all to see your face and eyes captured in wonder.
a bell sound snapped me into order. we were receiving rations and new men. R broke his lounge, but not his long stare and headed towards the centralizing station. walking, he asked, “what do you need? paper, sugar…,”
“… letters from home!,” I finished the statement. In this game we played, a sort of call and response to that certain bell, words would be taken in exchange as toll. R marched with heavy steps towards the station on a path that seemed to narrow with distance. as I wondered about the source of his strength, of home, and of that which weighs him heavy; he who I called a friend became my brother.
Laughing
the lines and limits of hell had barely changed from the battles of time. completely opposed, i found myself circled back to exactly how i found my thoughts about home. i allow my attention to trail a shadow the scurried across the near ground beneath me. R, peering forward as always, reminds me to keep my eye on the space of a possible target. i was no more staring at sight or that offered beyond, but only staring for the sake of what i missed to see. surely I was conditioned by shadows so quickly receding. i felt that i was on the verge of a wreck, or perhaps a wreck is what i thought i needed; something like the end of my own nature collapsing to make just prolonged upheavals and untempered states of turmoil
