Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life[.]
                                        —Shakespeare¹

                                                  *

                    Further, let the god that is within you
                              be the champion of the being you are[.]
                                        —Aurelius²

god is a journeyman workman with bad materials and worse
tools whose perpetual excuse is, ‘I couldn’t have done it
any other way…’

among all peoples who cultivate the mind
this is what they find when they carry the torch
into the abyss, a shadow trembling at the mention of
anything so preposterous as a mistake like his: the truth
that, in giving you immortal life, he resigned me to
chase through time my other half without whom I cannot
live—

‘No accounting for taste,’ it’s said, how he fashioned
you is perfect, and now, ever since for once heaven
nailed it, I feel unfinished, thirsting for your sacred flame
which goes extinct wherever you aren’t, glowing mad in a
saintly way until finally the light spreads like angel wings
over this disease of needing you the warmth of its
song which causes my heart to sing, I melt indifferent
to the consequence of ridicule which has pilloried me in
your place, suffering eternity in every moment I’m disgraced and
blindly, with stone-thrown eyes of cold sorrow that darken only
at your parting, art which improves upon nature, uncertain words
painting purer virgin waters in which no fish have yet
came,

knowing for sure that when you want to and
not when I want you, you’ll come, running coolly over
the coals of desert tongues smouldering to ash whatever’s left
of language, filling in those parts of me others have
damaged, reaching to grab but never grasping just how to
describe this feeling that I now have, this wanting more
than fame, which is the thirst of youth, to outgrow
a garden and eat of its fruit, to be forgiven
for craving it, your kiss colouring the flesh of apples
red once bitten by the mouth of someone who gives
such great head, unable to resist love paid for in
promises.

__________
¹William Shakespeare, “[Sonnet] 100”, [Stanza 1, Line 13], in The Sonnets: Introduction by Peter Harness, published at London by Collector’s Library in 2009; page 100.
²Marcus Aurelius, “Book Three: Written in Carnuntum”, [Paragraph] 5, in Meditations: Translated and with Notes by Martin Hammond: With an Introduction by Diskin Clay, published at London by Penguin Classics in 2014; page 159.