kshanti

I want to taste the end of days on your skin, I want
to watch your eyes when my breath catches. Tell me
what you see, through the blush? Light descending,
time running out, the thread unwinding? This isn't
safe, it never can be. Stone sparks against water,

a mystery whose price runs high. Always on the edge 
of a conflagration. Still, I want to breathe it in, I 
want to drive those fires into my skin where I fall.
What is the feeling in my kintsugi heart that is not
quite emptiness, the desire to press my face 

against your back as you drift off, the tangible
knowledge of the aching distance we put between
our physical selves? It's no accident we're like this.
Śūnyatā whispers to me just out of reach, pale and

shaking in my hands, my renunciation of desires
forever shredded by this want, this strange and
telescopic love. As if no moment has passed, and
yet as if the end of the world has come and gone.

The resin I used to repair the cracks raises welts
on others' skin. The metal you burnished into my
wounds is all that remains. Mushin--the breaks
are our history. I will not forget, will not taste
the antidote in this life. I'd have you no other way.

消えないで

my heart is a jackal in the desert night, makes a sound
somewhere between a sob and a peal of laughter,
is fencing the stars, slender silver stabbing against
a backdrop strewn wild and white. I dream the clouds are
swelling over the cliffside, the salt air in my mouth,
I know this. this dream where your face is imprinted
with lines from my pillow. where I place my finger

and trace in blood returning. bread rising in the kitchen,
my pulse is a muffled drum, the same as the breath
dragged from the deepest part of my lungs;

clouds dark against the sunrise,
deep blue streaked with gold and orange and violet
dim in the memory of your hair, the new light reflecting.
and I smell tangerines, I smell jasmine, I smell clove
rising from my own skin. water wants to run, water wants
to fill up your slant-smiling mouth and overflow in words
I salt away.