Ash

I stole your hands the first time I touched them,
gripped your fingers in mine and refused to let
loose.
You couldn’t even be mine then.
Your eyes were still learning the roundness of my
face and
you were a visionary, a vision, and I was looking for
something to put my faith in. You showed me miracles
in fields of sunflowers in the middle of a sun-
scorched desert,
and I wished to burn myself until
I became the light that drew you. But you painted me
happiness, said you were looking for something to
reflect your light off of and I did;
I swallowed your rays
inside my gut and tried to reflect you into poetry.
Nothing I wrote was ever right.
No combination of twenty-six letters could ever form
something that could adequately contain your magic so I
transformed myself, turned my pens into violin strings
and moaned every time you played me,
back arched and strung over your shoulder.
We were symphonies.
We were orchestras.
Our nails in each other’s skins like music and
we became it, notes rising and falling into our ears
like melodies played in secret.
You sang me through my darkest hours, love.
Reached out and lit all my abandoned corners,
ignited flame from the ash that
swooped inside my halls.
I was the light that drew you, lover.
And you are painting me still,
joy and tenderness
your colors of choice.

Darling, I am writing to stop writing you.
I am hanging out all my pens to dry and burning all my
notebooks.
I surrender.
I surrender.
Every-day language was not tailored to fit all your
divinity, and I am a peasant,
a lowlife,
a barbarian kneeling at your feet,
and you are the Light that has driven all my ghosts
away.
And I surrender.
I surrender it all to you,
take my rhythm and rhyme
and meter and diction and
leave me only those hands
still gripped tightly between my fingers,
thumb steadying my heartbeat
and pulling me home.