God has composed you as a poem
within my heart,
and decreed its longing-fashioned letters
by a destiny well-ordained.
Each day I slay one of its veins,
to write you in crimson blood–
offered in devotion to you–
a color that mirrors your lips,
a torment that befits me each night.
Never have I slept a wink in peace,
leaving agonies of passion behind my pillow.
Whenever I seek to seduce slumber,
a pulse awakens in the folds of my mind and soul,
dense with you to the point of rupture.
Sometimes I reclaim from you what little I can,
stealing back a fragment of my heart
to remain with myself,
sewing, with stitches of insomnia,
the throat of a vein,
so that I may postpone my death until tomorrow,
or the day beyond,
as I may feel within then.
Fragile and worn, I feel it now—
a heart soon to be heavily wounded,
unable to endure a stitch or even a sting.
How then can I presume my end before its appointed hour,
when you have seized my mind without respite,
but leaving my pierced heart
to gnaw upon a thousand agonies and more?
Perhaps I shall live tomorrow, or the day after,
but how many veins run through my poem-pulsed heart?
How many, while you remain a secret tearing me apart—
a secret that cannot be revealed?
If I reach my term, read my face–
even in imagination–the last of my poems:
“It’s enough—that you remain a secret.”
