when i say that i’m yours by Fray Narte
when i say that i'm yours, what i mean is:
i leave love poems in your doorstep,
they will grow, one by one,
soft heathers beneath your feet,
we can run like incorruptible children;
i do not know pain, i do not know longing,
i only know your laughter and how it flutters about like yellow butterflies resting on the tip of my nose.
when i say that i’m yours, what i mean is:
i will keep this love in a bottle — some things will never change like a fossil in a museum only i can visit,
a letter only i can read
like my brother dying before knowing his name
and how cruel the world can be to those who lived.
i will keep this love in a bottle until it grows bigger and bigger and bigger than our chests,
without breaking — not even once.
when i say that i’m yours, what i mean is:
you’ll always find me, burning like wildfire into your memory, crawling inside out to your skin
until we blaze, until we dethrone the apolline sun out of the sky, taking down with it the very fabric of the cosmos,
i am your beginning — you are my end.
when i say that i’m yours, what i mean is:
poets are liars — they have swallowed all the bees
and left us with nothing but the weight of flower seeds
on our chest, they grow and push and bury us in the earth — i will find you the moment she dies and ascends —
give you my soiled, beaten heart,
here, take what you need: the chart of my earthly birth,
the shape of my heavy sighs.
when i say that i’m yours, what i mean is:
i look at you and keep the poems to myself, afraid
of their inadequacy, their muted, prosaic history
lingering, their casual tendency to turn
into flesh and disastrous devotion — we are
the hideous, lesser gods — fallen and deserted,
see, take a hard look at what i did,
so desperately futile and laughable,
so i say ‘i love you’ like a mortal.
so, when i say that i’m yours, what i mean is:
these lines hold little meaning, they evade my mouth —
and i have nothing more to say whenever i say that i’m yours; will that suffice darling,
this brief proclamation,
this sweet delirious surrender?
i have no more poems left to write.
will it suffice, then, when i say that i
a poet, am yours, darling,
in this unlikely wordless state
was there ever a time that i didn't love you?
