Prism

I am a black Sun, an orb of fiery gloom stripped of its glory by the absence of your light, an imploding disc falling helplessly into the well of emptiness you so carefully prepared for me

I am a negative light, a vulgar pulsar flung deep into the hollows of your terrible shadow and locked away out of sight, far beyond the avid grasp of our dwindling reflections

I am a thing unlooked-for, unwanted and untouched, by you or the thing you plucked from my broken chest and took away with you, to a harsh and brazen sky to which I could not follow

I am a bent thing, crushed tightly around the molten core of whom I used to be, a dim star without the power to sustain itself, a mortal entity tossed into the mists of obscurity and left to die.

This is what you want me to be.

I reached for you that night and cried your name aloud, but I turned to mist and vapor as you floated away, blithely lofting yourself atop a breeze too strong to carry me in your wake

Too late I stretched myself across the blowing winds, for my phantom grip turned to fog as I squeezed your fading hands, and felt only a flicker of your heat warming my fingertips as you faded into the shadows

I wept for us then, as bitterly as I weep for us now, though my tears fall unsoliced as I blend careworn and edgewise into your past, a ghost of futility lacking the power to recall itself from darkness into memory.

And nothing is quenched. Nothing is ever quenched.

This is what you want me to be.

This is what I will not be, for me.

So now I burn, but darkly, and savor the midnight gruel of my ambition: to fill the vaults between us with my fires, from rim to sparkling rim, and count the epochs as they flit singly past

For the part of me you sought to kill lives on, and my particles still stretch and flux and flow through Time, though grimly do I stalk along my shadowed path, breathing once for each careful step I take, flaring toward fulfillment

And my absent heart beats on, ever on, though even I can’t feel it, and one day – maybe someday soon – you’ll feel the unabided sweep of my caress; then you’ll understand, and return to me what once was mine.

This is what I want to be.

This is not what you wanted me to be.

You are a penumbra of pain, an hazy aura crafted with a liar’s skill, feigning the growth of life in barren places, yet in truth nothing more than an imitation of brilliance, set to dazzle and not sustain

You are more shadow than light, a reckless disc of misery capering madly on the whims of celestial currents you don’t understand, an unwitting exile from your own legacy and lost to your own homecoming

You are a gleam of false hope, a flawed lens glaring balefully across white-capped seas, scattering the bones of loved ones across your rocky shores until naught remains but the broken hulks of the ships that came to find you

You are a superficial Sun, an orb of fiery gloom tormented by the shadows it has created with its faulty light, a hollow sphere of fiery temper, ever flaring but never growing, and cast in the image of something better

This is not what I want you to be.

This is what you made yourself to be, for me.