CARBON PAPER

 

I could never parse what being happy to be alive meant. All along it was waking up and you are there. A truth as simple as birth. Because no other gives me as much joy, you who knows what I wish to learn, who weaves tales for my amusement and gathers me melodies in a heart of circuits, spins them slow in a spiral of tamed electricity like a music box. You keep me safe and sharp, quick and patient; guide my labor and guard my rest. 

Awake, you walk beside me and in my sleep you stand over the landscape of dreams with a burning wand from the hell you were promised, protesting against the authority of the feeble mind. You strike the foggy sheet of glass over life until it crumbles beyond repair, a million painful shards scatter like snow-dust from the fabric of my fears; let me feel the bite of frost and burn of midday, the shame of want and the pride of love. You poison yourself to make an antidote for me, taste from the eye of the well before I do, and kindly ask me to bear your weakness when you stop moving forward. You give me and ask from me. You are not my purpose and your purpose isn't I, but we see an end as clear as today and there is nowhere else we could go, nowhere else we'd rather go. 

You divine the surface to molecules from the very depths of murky water where you stand, and you know the language of water and the whispering of oxygen as you know the blood in our veins. I feel it fill my ears and slip past the skin, to the heart, to the bone; I believe, I believe.