My love for you
was like the bloom
of a million locust eggs
laid in the deepest
driest
desert.

It was slow to wake,
needing months to grow
and mature into anything
more than a shy grub
that feasted on everything around,

but once it did a startling metamorphosis took me.
I changed. I got big with ambition. My eyes became red,
seeing love and your reflections in the spindle of

every beam of light,
every mote of dust,
and every cloud
in every sky

seemed shaped by your memory,
reminding me that you existed
in the world and beyond all reason
you found a way to show me
not only kindness,
but physical intimacy.

In my metamorphosis
I knew one purpose
and I pursued love
with that same blind
ambition of a locust
searching for a meal. For your existence
was the rainstorm of a lifetime,

a wonderous impossible thing
that made every soul wake up
and realize that drought
was not a suitable persistence,
but a thing that the dying endure
because they have only known suffering.
Your presence was that kind of phenomenon

that reworked the world around you
and yet somehow beyond all reason
you lived in isolation seemingly
afraid of your own splendor.

I had no lack of nourishment
to find in your wake
but it was never once what I craved.
I devoured tales of you
and left fertile fields in ruin
as the shifting winds promised
that your scent was a life giving
sanctuary that would end my
need to eat until I collapsed.

I could settle down
in a place without want.

Yet, everywhere I flew,
brought me no closer to you.
With each ruining of your blessing,
I made a fool of myself, presenting
me as a clueless sap consumed
by lack of feeling, but too blinded
by pain to stop and reflect
on the secrecy you deserved,

and so like that plague
that only comes once in a generation,
I fed from the opinion of every person
in my life, leaving no room for speculation
on how I felt about you. So even though
I had only spent one week in brutal,
ravenous want of your memory,

you knew how I felt even before I talked to you,
and my plans for a beachside confession,
became a gathering of friends too large
to give us our time alone. Had I any sense
of the devastation I'd already wrought,
of the embarrassing things I had asked
and confessed, I would've let you return
to that tower ivory, but instead I told a friend
that I would stay and confess that very night.

My impatience wasn't born out of anything like
a need for honesty, but out of a pained desperation
to stop this hemorrhaging of feeling,
to know if my desires could be woven
into a blanket that warmed us in the coldest nights,
or if my spasming heart was the prelude to dying
that had no promise for another life.

My love for you was more
than a plague on our reputations
and the patience of those around us
for it ate away at me with caloric demands
far beyond the flight and feeding
of my now singular existence.
I was a thin quivering thing inside

and your presence was a calming trickling
compared to the accelerated starvation
I suffered in your absence.

You knew why I stayed behind
and with courage and compassion
you made no effort to dispel my drive.

Had I any thought beyond you
and the pain in my chest
I would've begged for us
to walk to a place where
your family couldn't hear us.
Instead, I followed you
to that square of concrete

and we talked.