i.

: Find me when I am untenable. Enclose these hands, this heart, these hours with the harboring horrors of human touch.

: Baptize me with the flames of your worship. Burn my soul with your beliefs and let it evaporate towards Heaven. I am holy in defeat.

: When I utter these words and submit myself to absolute vulnerability, tell me: am I praying to a god I cannot see or denouncing my humanity?

: So where were you when you were me? Do I still carry the same hopes and dreams you had about becoming a poet?

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ii.

: Call an archaeologist to dig the remains of my youth. Carbon-date the years I chose to forget to see how much of the world has forced me to grow older. From a distance, the excavation site would look like a posthumous wake of undignified false promises and childhood dreams. The earth will soon carve me from its core, the tender touch of emulsifying heat.

: Let my fears fossilize under the shifting earth. My anger shall shake the archipelago of my adolescence. The continents of my conscience will reassemble for millions of years and I will remain incomplete.

: For each repressed memory, construct a favorable fiction. Finally, I am truly depersonalized.

: One day, when you touch the sky, you will have owned the entire world. Reconstruct my memories in a different language, redefine my worldview from your perspective, and unearth all of my worries and fears. Let the city forgive us. In time, a new universe shall bloom with all this entropy.

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iii.

: Unapologetically, all things will fade away, not as a consequence of nature but with the looming guilt of being incapable to carry the weight of permanence. What is immortal has accepted the mortal submission to be anything other than human.

: Split sections of myself silence the air, creating another universe between celestial bodies. What I found is a love that runs more symbolic than the light of the moon. The moon, a mirror to different versions of myself, a source of reflection for gods that we can touch.

: Who we are in the presence of the divine, crumbles in an instant.

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Note: First published on Tickle Lit Issue 2: Melancholy