© Forever to Alphonse Mucha.

I want to tell you what you are is beauty, like streaks of cloud across the brightening sky lit like fire from the rising sun. But instead you fill yourself with falling dark, inhaling winds and freezing rains that birth themselves in rivulets of melting ice that pool upon your upper lip.

Where I rejoice in morning pouring forth, you lay upon the shore of night with starlight lapping at your feet. You watch me twisted ‘round, plunging backwards through the frigid surf compelled to pull you forward though the waves and back to me- but it is not for me to say that you cannot become remains. Remnants still I’ll grasp for, though still they will refuse my touch.

Audrey Kawasaki ©2009 Learn more @ http://www.audrey-kawasaki.com/

I'm trying to remember if you screamed when I pushed my arms into the cavity of your chest. Struggling to grasp at something, anything but reuniting again only with my own hands. I might have withdrawn, but instead I locked my fingers and pressed a little further into you. Until with nose and chin and one last gulp of air, I opened my eyes- already burning- into that space you carried with you.

I realized my mistake.

It wasn’t just some void that hung down from your larynx and rested on your ribcage, but instead was full of innumerable particles that birthed themselves from the dust of bones and stars that died a thousand years ago.

I had no idea you were so old, so hungry. I must admit the smell inside of you raised every hair I had. That smell of carcass gone to fossil, it still excites me.

Back home I found I’d gained the tendency to leave the meat- in waxen paper tied around with twine- upon the counter. Hours and days and time on time. It was hunger drove me to this, though I ate none. The scent poured forth, indulging every crack in lustful permeation. With eyes closed, head tilted back, my hands, always restless, would wander. Wander.

And always, in the rolling in of fog, find their way back to you.