moths, phantasms

What ever made me think it could be

you?

You, off touting the ultra-sanity of your

godlessness

and burning your insides before you’re

old enough.

it’s nine years ago

and I don’t have it in me to tell you

that your up-all-night-in-sadness is the singe of a consciousness deluding itself for fun, pinching out the flame, just to have something to do—

you wouldn’t hear me

in your extinguishment,

and I’m not yet fully lit.

I’m a child too,

and believe you capable of scaling a wall

that should one day become visible to you

when I love you hard enough.

I’m naive and do not know yet the way of

wasting,

it’s commonplaceness,

the way that children become stuck in

sagging and wrinkled bodies, mired.

I’m but a child too, and would dare

to think your removedness

my own inadequacy.

I really thought that.

I did,

until you told me, walking down that

final hallway,

(that I now understand to be somewhere

you might always wander,

the commonplaceness to do so

I can see only because

I’m almost fully lit now, less of a child):

/you see so much purpose in the world—

quite frankly,

it scares the shit out of me/.

To stop loving you

is another thing altogether.

but at least I stopped not knowing what

so sickened every shadow of a man

I ever drew forth like a flame,

I ever annihilated like a fire;