litany for the dollar-store prophet

in dreams, we recall

I dream of you again.

I make you this subject of my dwindling hours, flashing light from just across the lake. Catch you falling, lightburned, in between the layers of sleep, crumbling, melting beneath my tongue like sweet punishment.

Until you are nearly real, almost literal —

And then you fade again. Your curls were never really carbon; your bones never really calcium, temples of memory alone, constructed in light bearing a resemblance to a leaving lover.

You are always leaving, always on your way out the door, the glint of your smile and the shimmer of your sunlit bones only echoes. A ghost caught on the sensitive film of my body. You never make it to the darkroom. I favor the ending where I pretend the photographs never existed.  

You were never enough to love, and I was never enough to want, but in the dream we link our pinkies and go careening off the cliff. In the dream, these fangs are an anchor, and the white-hot pain is close enough to love to forget what all the movies claimed.

Banish you from dreamhalls and stop romanticizing the body of a boy who does not know I harbor love like a gunpowder ship; like a pierced sparrow clutched between my teeth.

Your body is not mine to love but you have robbed the coffin of my living corpse and left all my treasures on display. You found the sharpest thorn and I believe you a shrike all along. Your heart is never close enough but you have kept mine caged. Witness, hunger, heart down.

My body is bruised and my heart is open and you are still looking away. You are always looking the wrong direction.

I avoid the fundamental truths of attraction – the way sex speaks in human tongues never applies, not to need it nor to crave. But in flashes you are speaking, and there's the hollow of your slender throat and I – perhaps, I am predatory. All senses of the word. These are my vampiric inclinations, the cloudstepping high from the sight of a jugular bared. In your fluid motions you are strong and delicate the same, performing the steps of your steel ballet. Call on the apocalypse, lover boy, and I will take Revelation to bed.

Either side of the coin, one of us ends up destroyed. Feel me before my teeth. I avoid the ancient tongues of desire cloaked in anything but veils of metaphor, like decomposing bodies wrapped in scarves; for the own nature of my body is not enough to admit. I dare not desire for I might catch a glimpse of my own reflection in that desert mirage. But still, there is that image, again, of you, captured, static in your gaze and watching me and I want only clarity but the universe does not answer. The empty space you do not occupy never serves as a replacement. Could I really, be enough?

The way you crashed into me made me forget I was a wolf. Cricket punctuated silence. The clocks tick forward, seconds like quicksand caught by your tongue. You are my dying breath.

I skipped past divinity and went right to praying to you. Answer me, temple of skin forgotten. If you could wield the knife, would you have the guts to bear it? Or are you too, disgusted by the shadow of my desire, Poseidon’s rage to drown even the strongest sailor?

Sometimes I think I am too much for any man to love, like shooting arrows at the moon.

I have tried to cleanse myself and wound up right at the doorway of you again, like you always know when I am close to cutting myself free and making a run for it.

I became a hostage the second you walked in the room.

I need to release you from the halls of memory entirely or stop capturing you in fragments. I call you a ghost, but you are more a reflection in a house of mirrors. I am capturing your image from all angles, circular, perpendicular prayer. 

I know your want does not mirror mine, and for you to return these feelings I need to tread careful. Cat-feet on pine earth, not to awaken the wolf or startle the deer the same.

But still, I dream of you, and you are golden and impossible; first ray of forgotten sunlight. But in the callous evening the honey of your mouth fades in sugarsnap speed and I always was in the company of my own. I wake up the same, with the haze of you lingering on me from afar in memory just.

In the bed where I dreamt I kissed your temple, the crown of your head, I kiss my own wrists, marking place of crucifixion. I learned young the places best to perform a one-act play between a knife and an artery. Cross the train tracks but do not walk the railroad straight ahead. Kill me, here, do it so tenderly, and write on the gravestone that I died in summer, and I died for love, like it always was meant to be.

When I die for you, it's prophecy.