CALL ME BELOVED

I’ve filled up that yawning vacancy inside of me
with words, again, the old problems reappearing –
how paper pages make for thin skin, or haggard
veins circulating ink which cannot carry oxygen –

but I’m consuming them nonetheless, starved for
touch and reason and all the hearth-fire comfort
of skin just beside you, sharing warmth inside and
out, pulsing like an ebbing tide between the two,

but now I’ve filled up vacancies with distractions.
I’ll pay no mind to skipping beats, no icy pangs of
DSM-diagnosable panic, no sleep-wake disorder
of waking up to the nightmare. No. It’s all too real.

Do you feel as though you’re stealing time, too?
How many of your dreams survived past twenty?
Or does each sweep of the second hand shock you
like it astonishes me, still – how my composition is

melodic and not dissonance, not screeching, nor
silence which would permit the whispering leech
of old voices not our own, poltergeists conjured
as children, campfire stories that should’ve burned,

instead now I stack notebooks. I sing loudly. Sleep
beside a faint video glow of fake fireplaces hissing,
whispering warm wishes in the dead still of night –
in the morning I’ll write something new. All too real.