We Will Write Numbers

This day has no night,

the boundaries are pushed back to beyond

what can be counted up.

What will even matter, in the end, when we reach the final

barrier? Reach out your

arms as wide as they will go, and I will stand beside you

and do the same; our fingertips will touch, we will be

an unbroken unity of form.

(There shall be peace in the land)

A river turns in oxbows, nearly kissing it's own back

and carving through green fields, but always in the same

direction.

(I should have told you I could live without you,

but I don't want to.)

The concertina collapses, the ends rush together, meeting with a

click, a sorrow of air.

The sun is motionless overhead, evening will not come nor dawn,

we will never see the stars or the moon, the distant winking Venus

or angry Mars. It is enough, to be denied the heavens, to be drawn back

from the edges of finite space and time to this one time and space.

A hand within a hand, secretly, under the table where no one

can see,

but surely they can all see the radiating light that is bursting and pulsing

from my chest like a newborn star, fed on the touch, the boundary finally

broken.

We are each a secret

we are each to be denied to all but the other. This is mine, we both say in our

heads, at the same time, to ourselves.

Do not let me go

is written across the sky of this new world

and we will be brave

and explore together, willful as children, fearful and adamant.

And the days remain days, even when the dark comes; thought is an egg,

held dear and protected within (I still think of you, even after all this time)

the hard iron cage of the body, which unlocked at this touch,

the hard iron fist around the heart

loosened one finger

and breathing was no longer automatic, but a conscious labor.

We sat side by side on the bus, each trembling.

We will write numbers on the backs of our hands,

on the pale fishbellies of the undersides of our forearms.

We will love each other, amateurs of war.

The sun moved forward, a molten drop falls into place,

the first of what will become,

in time,

the barrier.

But we love each other in daylight, and moonlight is merely

the sun reflected,

so there is no night, no night not ever, really.