toward firelight

It isn’t enough to find your gaze across mine over coffee and know we’d shared a sweet and heavy sleep the night before as the equinox wrote itself in the fallen leaves and the rustle of air on the back deck. It isn’t enough to have poured you that second cup, to have delivered fresh warmth to your lips, to see the knob of your throat rise and fall a few degrees and feel the small luxury of this stolen moment before the day unwound its threads. It isn’t enough that just yesterday, I cried good tears into your neck, telling you the truth about some long-buried thing. This hunger begets hunger. I cannot stop the great uncoiling of desire, the way our bodies keep disrobing their old masks, how we have returned to obliterate history through this clear-eyed, antidotal love. It isn’t enough to swallow that medicine whole. Like a moth, I am flinging myself irreverently toward firelight. I'll never know how close we are to dying, but I won’t stop until everything burns.