My Darling,

Perhaps you’d be willing to teach me the spell you’ve cast on my heart, so I could make you feel the way I do? The gentle glide of your fingertips along my spine raises bumps on my thighs; your lips always seem to linger so close to mine. I am haunted by you, but possession isn’t something to fear anymore. The ghost of your body against mine drives me to insanity, yet I always arrive unscathed; I am completely and totally whole. You are a gusting breeze pushing me forward; the comforting embrace of a familiar scent leading to an unknown, yet knowingly perfect destination. In the voices of strangers I hear you call; your bellows forever echoing through my skull. Perhaps a priest could help me? But I don’t want any help, thank you, sir. Envelop me in your heat; consume me with your gaze. Whatever incantations you’ve cast have shot up my veins and saturated my blood, with you. Maybe I’m an addict? But since when does withdrawal make everything so painfully and beautifully clear? I am complete in your love. I am full, and I am at rest in your arms. Your's is a spirit I will happily house for the rest of eternity. Come home sweetness. What should we have for dinner?

Like words caught on tips of tongues, you are a flavour I remember, but cannot seem to taste. Perhaps my buds have shed; changing seasons bringing forth fresh blooms while wilted petals fall and decay, becoming soil once more. I am but a tree trying to recall what colours she used to produce in this specific Garden of Eden.

Green envy and red angry thorns no longer burst from my branches. Only syrup oozes from these cracking limbs and callusing hunks of bark. Too many storms have I weathered to not bend with even the slightest of breezes, now. Many a snapping lightning strike has softened my ever knotting grain. The twisted Willow you probably remember is still weeping, but for very different reasons do her cascading vines shake and heave.

My leaves no longer house spiders.

I was never the mighty Oak you may have wanted to envision, but perhaps my drifting gentleness will suite you better, now that winter has become spring and we can finally blossom together in compassion, not competition. Oh, how sweet will the scent of our flowers be, sickening perhaps, but only almost. Your heavy bouquet, no matter how dangerous, has always been undeniably intoxicating; familiarity is starting to gather itself at the back of my throat.

My buds remember you after all, it would seem, but your zest no longer offends me, for I have developed a love of all things spicy. How many cups of sugar, though, must I pour down your throat to mask the acidic burn I must have left behind?

Years of heavy rain have made me much more palatable, I promise.

I don’t want to be your poison anymore.

I want to nourish your roots.

Sweet Darling,

How will I ever find the words to show you the way my heart aches for you?

Maybe with the way my eyes sparkle, the smiles I flash, and the moans I sigh out in the early hours of the morning, I can begin to explain.

It will never be enough. How can I make you understand?

I have wandered the thoughts of the brokenhearted, the passionate, the lustful and the loving to find the feelings I feel for you, and yet they remain hidden. No one has felt as intensely as I, for you, or anyone else who has ever breathed. The greatest poets, songwriters and bleeding hearts cannot help me find a way to scream my love to the heavens above.

Never enough...How can I show you? Where are the words I long to scream out?

I would give anything for you, my sweet love. Take the breath from my lunges, the blood from my veins and the bones from my limbs. I will still find a way to love you.

What a torturous thing we are. Ravaged by love but so overflowing that we are unable to spill at all. Torture on, my sweet love, for I crave the smell of your skin, hot against mine, and your voice sighing “I love you”, night after night, until dark becomes light and I am given another day to prove my affection for you.

I want you, forever.

I want this love to kill me; slowly, carefully, beautifully.

When I lay in my bed on the last day I have, with my hand on your chest and your breath on my ear, I will cry out in thankful sobs.

Everyone is dying, my sweet love. Slowly, year after year; we age, we ache and we flow through time as gracefully as allowed.

But we all die.

So thank you, my darling, for I will die from love.

Day by day, with every tick of the clock and grain of falling sand, I will love you.

Every rising sun and moon, I will find new pieces of you to touch and caress and love and love and love.

Your eyes, your hair, your skin. The way your chest rises and falls in peaceful slumber. Your breath on my neck and sweet, sweet passion. The warmth of your lips pressed against my own; the way that you moan.

Kill me with your perfection. Help me die from absolute euphoria. I am sick with love for you. I do not want any medicine.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Until I find better words; always and eternally yours forever,

Sing me to slumber with lullabies of love and lust.

I can hold your heart for a lifetime, but who am I to deserve unconditional care and admiration?

You do not belong to me, but I am happy to borrow your soul, just for a little while.

We'll consider it a lease.

Where do I sign?

The wailing of my shattered soul ceased the second your familiar call of salvation finally echoed into my exhausted ears.

I had been listening for you with bottomless hope and desperation since before I realized you might be walking the same Earth as me again.

Souls don't often collide in repetition like ours, but I guess my chemicals explode when they touch yours, and the universe wants to repaint with the colours we create.

What took you so long, sweetheart?

Didn't you know I was reaching into the night sky of my dreams hoping you would grasp my hand and pull me from my waking nightmare?

We've met before, but I figure I'll introduce myself again.

"Hello.

I'm supposed to yours, remember?

Nice to finally meet you."

January 9th, 2011.

Poppa,

It's hard to imagine it has been six years since I have seen your face.

I see you reflected in my mother's laugh and loving ways.

Your eyes, are hers as well, with their glittery blue shine and troublesome glint.

Thank you for giving her to me.

I feel your hand upon my shoulder when I wish upon a falling star, or on my birthday candles, or on a lucky horseshoe.

Tim Hortons coffee does not taste the same since you left.

I still never win on scratch tickets...you always got the good ones.

I know I will never again hear your laugh, with its rises and falls of a gently crashing ocean tide.

I hope I make you proud.

I live my life in a dream of becoming even half as glorious as you.

You shape and mold my life, daily.

I miss you, and I love you.

Rest in Peace Poppa.

With a coat of hand drawn sketches,

and a quartet of folded, hard cover corners, 

you ripped my thoughts from the base of a bottomless chasm

to the top of your recently dusted shelf.

Who else had beheld your smooth spine and clean edged pages, 

without leaving a trace,

before my rough hands oiled you with prints?

Why was I jealous of a story that another may have grasped more tightly and thoroughly than I, 

without knowing there was another at all?

Because, my dear,

you were mine.

The call of your untold truths resonated in my head

from your space on the loudest rock,

in a universe of screamed lies,

exploding inaccuracies

and hastily invented slander.

Your scent fluttered my pupils to another position of the clocks

and showed me a place where the calender's cubes formed strange rectangles instead.

I remembered you.

Perhaps, I had read you in another edition of myself.

An unedited version.

A me before grandfather clock revealed your face for reconsideration.

Perhaps, you taught me about the latest ME.

Perhaps, you shone a light on my darkest parts. 

The words you contained and laid before the world,

unashamed and shining,

pardoned my dreams of the guilty, lost fog they held upon themselves,

like glorious diamond shackles.

You,

with your chapters of thinly arranged wood, 

rolled away my haze,

as porous cloth cleanses

browning rims of mugs in the smallest hours of all night coffee shops.

Your honey sweet song sang to me across the floor of a dampened and tattered bookstore.

The carpet had traveled the world by foot, 

but our adventure was just beginning.

You knew I was yours,

and I would not have accepted any other fate.

My eyes have crossed every speck of ink on your body, now.

I know your curves,

your dips and grooves,

and your mountainous plummets.

You are my home.

But why, then,

my sweetest darling,

are you so difficult to understand?