Handle With Care

Downward, come as you are. Come with the stars coating your tongue and laughter sitting in your mouth and not leaking but seeping through all the cracks in the foundation of your angelic facade. I love you, and how you are both garden and lake, both love and lush, both apple and snake. We'll love like Gaia told us to, that day on the river when you thought so fervently about how God never spoke without leaving you reeling. We'll love like we read about, years ago, voices echoing and fingertips tracing over each crack and crevice of the only scripture you have ever believed, and I'll be here, and you'll be with me. We'll get tangled in the vines we so carefully tended to from nine am to two. We're going to find you. I'm going to pull you out of the mud where your mother buried you. We will make you whole. When you make it--if you make it--bring me back a galaxy in your jaws. You will breathe over me, and I will covet every disgusting color our pitiful human eyes can see. I only know warmth when our bodies meet. We will be all of hell. We will power it with nothing but the chattering of our teeth. We will fall, but this time, into the sheets.