The pendulum swings yet again back and forth
as I ask you the millionth time and one more
if you still love me, still tolerate
my existence, are sure towards me
you hold no sliver of anger or hate.
Because we've made these vows so many more times,
but I'm forbidden by my anxiety
from failing to plan for any contingencies.
Like I'm my father now,
I myself with questions hound:
"Well, now you're twenty-two,
and I don't want to seem like I'm forcing you
to come along with me."

Angel numbers meet at midnight's bend.
"For you, you'll never see me again."
But Jett, does it work the other way?
If I ask you to, will you forever stay?
Will you swear yourself in health and sickness to my lonely side?
Will you in this new world I am creating reside?

Because, you should know,
if you willed it,
I would gladly disappear.

Go, if you must,
without fear.
I will be here
at the end of every day
to reclaim
that which was only ever mine.

One can't raise a caricature of a human being
and then draw that same self livid
when everything their child sees
is out of proportion.

Turn again the ragged page,
but cover your eyes so you don't see
the crude pencil-filled sketchings
of my genus, my culled genious,
blueprints of my taxidermy,
footnotes of a contract forever ago signed:
"You promise me that you'll be mine
for as long as I can keep you alive."

A blood oath
that we both
signed
with the rivers through which flow our lives.
But I got too much under my fingernails,
double-crossed in reflex, same unleashing hell
in a moment I made the mistake of asking if all was well.
And when I noticed what I had done,
I turned back the hands of time
to when you and I
were still alive.
A memory is just a record, one that I can rewrite
in case of failure, in case hard enough I did not try.

You only know of this because this deep-
sworn vow I am unable to keep,
to keep to myself the number of rewinds.
I am testing, and you are production,
only knowing of the strand of fate accepted,
battle-tested,
deemed sacred and happy and true.
Is it comforting, I wonder, to know
there will be no futures where I hurt you?

I kept my promise to you, Jett.
I toed the path until the end.
Pushed aside the branches that fell
on the cracking path
and found detours around those whose bark
I could not form a painless grasp.
Through the flood zones I trode
in puddles and in gasping leaps
and for those to traverse too deep
found a different way home.
The path is bordered now with dandelions
and violet slips I cannot name.
So many friends have come and gone,
but here you and I remain.
I'm waiting here, Jett. Just like I
was a year ago, holding my hands high
and with sore throat pleading to the sky:
"Here I am! Here my vessel resides!
Take me home. I've fought the fight."
I've fought the fight. I've won the war.
And, Jett, I want to fight no more.
I see no point to compete
with those who I'd rather broker peace,
rather never see ever again,
rather watch disappear
on the wind.
I'll wait here. And I'll wait here
until you're ready, until of
this departure you have no more fear,
until I hear you singing my name like a hymn.

Even though I have multitudes inside me,
without you by my side, I feel null and empty.
I know that by myself I'm still whole and complete,
but yet remains a void inside, you, the missing piece.

I wonder, do you also feel
on occasion the urge to self-negate?
"If I can't have you,
I can't have myself,
and I don't see any point in anything else."
I wonder, where did you and I learn to hate
ourselves so?
Who beat us down? Who pruned the branches?
Who commanded us to kneel?

"Do you know why
I bothered so long with this dreadful life?
Why, even facing down an eternity
of servitude with no way to become free,
I still struggled on, bothered to take breath?

Tell me first, Lethe, what do you expect
to be accomplished upon your death?
Who do you think will be saved if you manage to die?
What salvation given? What hope signified?
Do you really think, the moment your breath comes to cease,
nobody ever again will from violence bleed?

I toed for five years the line
between ineffectual death and a pale shadow of life
because I prayed, I dared to hope,
even if it ebbed more than it flowed,
that one day would come a world where I'd fit
and I'd have a reason to cut loose and go.
It didn't have to mean passing through an Eye.
It could grow
inside the shell of the old
and, when ready, hatch, blossom in the light.

Before the Town, before Yewiffe,
before precious Sablade,
you were already my Anima Mundi,
my soul of the world soon on its way.
I crawl into your arms and think,
'This is where I belong.
This is where I am supposed to be.
This is where my heart says
I should spend eternity.'

Lethe, I love you because
you only ever wanted
to set me free."

We're coming up on the end of the Eschaton, you and I,
and for almost a year I've planned for next month to die.
But it's impossible to plan for every contingency.
What are we to do if May passes and I'm still living?

I've kept this faith secret in me, learned every way to hide
and still let through a sliver of this lightning kept inside.
There's so much love you've planted in this garden that's my body
that perhaps, if I stand still enough, others will see my wings.

In the birds that convened outside my window
gathered in a flock until they took flight,
in the blackened tree branches that scraped
against an ashen gray sky,
in the first blooms and blossoms
of my garden in birthing spring:
if it was good and beautiful, I saw you in everything.