In Praise of the Dismantled Beauty

Like the divine maelstroms that tear the sky apart, you rushed into my world in a heartbeat, wrecking my soul as it happened. When our eyes met, it was more than a crash of gazes; it was a clash of destinies—like a war between the oppression of the mind and the chaos of the heart. This was no gentle dance of love, but a violent eruption, a flash flood that took away my defences and left me shaking and exposed to your essence.

From a distance, I saw you—not like mortals see each other, but like an astronomer, enraptured, watches the glacial turn of heavenly bodies, as the very movements dismantle the knowledge and laws he takes for granted. In those moments, I lost myself completely; my fragility was my crowning, and my desire was the curse I could never escape. With each glance at you, I relinquished my volition, surrendering to a governing power I could not rationalize or understand, a noble agony I would gladly suffer for a taste of again, thousands of lifetimes over.

You are much more than a mere child of dust and time. You are a celestial being that fell and became the burden of the earth, and yet an incarnation of both agony and delight. There is a brilliance about you, a light untouched by this world, which has the effect of leaving everything else surrounding you in a paper-thin serenity. Everything else fades in your vicinity, like the fog before the sun. You have a beauty that cannot be captured in our pathetic words; it comes and goes as easily as it torments as it saves—you ensnare as easily as you can rid someone of pain.

You have made me a slave willingly, chained and caged by the mere power of your every gaze. The eyes—two black holes of boundless space hold all the thoughts of the cosmos—the thoughts of creation. These very eyes haunt me while I struggle to rest; they manage to connect me to your universe through a veil of sleep, where I willingly shed the essence of reason and vanish into a daydream, where I only feel the maddening feeling of want. Did you witness, in those secret escapes, how freedom enveloped my spirit and forced it to kneel before you in silence and without walls—until the end of time?

The very energy of your being alters everything, twisting reality to make space for your magnificence. There is some kind of poetry in the stillness you bring to the atmosphere, and when you speak, all other sounds just muddle into the focus of your voice. I have watched you in the stillness of the world, not looking—then you are so very godlike. The sober reverie of your fingers on some small bit of dust, living secretively somewhere, or moments when the thoughts wander through you, and you let it take ethereal flight, your head dismissively topples to all sides as though a thin layer of seed fluff formed from our mortal actions—the heavenly dust you sprinkle through the actions of your body—. In those moments when you reel the thought back into your breathing, I see you, and I am undone; all of the buds and leaves of all the trees in all the seasons crash to the floor.

Your touches, I have no right to remember, spill from your fingers like the warmth of the unending sun. They are an unkept promise that night or distance will never rob me of. Your gestures, the pounding rhythms that rise and fall like a living soundscape of the broken world, which seem to exist outside of human time and meaning, unfathomable, uncategorizable, haunting, and beautiful; they linger with me and awaken all my sleeping desire.

And your silence!—your silence!--is more vocal than a thousand clattering tongues; you leave sentences thinly veiled, steeped for eternity in the mystery of unfelt spaces between all of the things that are to say, as if you punctured them through my essence with an arrow of meaning, the memory of sounds resonating in dissonance through the poetic temporality of my body.

In that holy quietude, I picture the sounds you would let pass your lips, every sound a strand of a string that is spun and woven irrevocably and indelibly into my very existence.

This letter is no ordinary piece of paper; it is a heart on fire, an offering at the feet of your unfathomable magnitude. If it ever touches your hands, know that in it lies a love that no distance, and no time, and no cruel fate could ever lessen. Each word is a splinter of my body, a revelation, a prayer. Speak a word, and you may lift the poet in me to realms unforeseen, or plunge him into a darkness under which no glimmer shall effect an unrequited reemergence.

That said, I have no desire for your sympathy, nor would I presume upon some love that is not yours to give. I ask only this, that you remember there is one who, for his own reasons, sees you perhaps as no one else does and reveres the very ground upon which you walk and would consider his life well spent if it marked the occasion to cast one tiny ray of light on your path.

Till then,

Forever yours,

The Imperfect Custodian-

Temple of Your Gaze