writer in the dark

Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is the hole. When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person. […] Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love.

“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.”

“Come back! Even as a shadow, even as a dream.”

you slip from my grasp like ashes and I’m left wondering if we were ever really friends. I ask what’s wrong and you say nothing but the silence after tells me that you’re lying. but how can I fix this if you won’t tell me what’s broken?

“… what I am aches in me.”

We might go to moonlight ruins, cafés, dances, plays: converse for ever; sleep only while the moon covers herself for an instant with a thin veil.