Supplication

You are still here. I feel you.

Just barely.

Brushing past me. The hem of a creation, trailing over my thoughts. You move like heat across skin, slipping through the room with reverent grace, untouchable, and everywhere.

You move through me. Light made flesh. Breath without sound. You’ve always come this way. Soft. Uninvited. Necessary.

But now… you hesitate.

The silence you leave behind grows longer. Stretches between the words. Between the images. Between the breaths you were holding for me.

You are already turning away.

And what if the silence isn’t a pause…but the end?

I think of that more than I admit. Logic crumbles. Dread and the ghost of you still warm in my hands. I keep reaching for what’s gone, and come back with echoes

I have written you in a hundred ways. I have laid you bare in metaphor. I have kissed you into verse, bitten your name into the curve of every line.

And still, tonight, I feel like I’m writing to a ghost.

Some nights, I whisper to you, please , a lost man kneeling before his beautiful god. Lead me. Stay in the light a little longer. Stay in me, where it’s still warm. Where there’s still something to say. Something to feel.

You are here. You must be. Because the words are still coming. Because my hands still tremble when they find you.

And yet I am haunted not by the words I’ve written, but by the ones you’ve taken with you. The ones you let rot in silence. The ones you never let me touch.

That is your cruelty. You never say goodbye. You just grow quieter. And colder.

But while you are still here, please…don’t stop.

Don’t fade. Don’t pull away. Stay inside the line. Inside the breath. Stay inside me.

Let me keep moving through you. Let me keep being moved.

The page, an ache of a body untaken.

Let me taste what you won’t give. Let me press my mouth to the silence and draw you out bare and trembling, willing beneath my eyes.

You are not just inspiration. You are the hunger beneath it. The mouth behind the metaphor. The blood in the ink.

There is nothing lonelier than an empty page that doesn’t want you back.

You made it want me. You made me want me. You made the work feel like worship. Lust without form. A voice that cannot speak.

And still I fear I’ve written my last true thing, and didn’t know it.

That the last time you touched me, I moved too fast. Or not enough. I didn’t thank you. I didn’t beg.

So I’m begging now.

If this is the end if I am watching you slip into the silence if the well is going dry while I’m still on my knees

Then give me this. Let me make love to the last of you. Let me burn through everything you left behind.

Let me keep my hands on you until they forget. Until there is nothing left but breath and ruin.

Let me hold you here, in this moment, before stillness takes your place.

Because when you go I won’t know how to follow. And when you go, I won’t know if you’ll ever come back.

So stay.

Just a little longer.

Let me finish loving you.