If I could be your love

in the next universe over

where love completes

a pair, I would

defect there with you.

But this is so abstract and

you are so real,

and my nuclear apple core ripples still from the touch

of your thought, the

old one

when you looked back at

me and made me unexpectedly welcome

in your palace of time's concerns. You

laughed at something I

said that wasn't funny,

and I heard the thrill

you felt for

the mystery I knew,

and I wanted your mystery instead.

And so you told me,

you unraveled the center of yourself

as the longest parchment

and I can't let any of it go

even as I let you go.

Where do I put all these words, yours

that I won't know how to forget?

And what do I do with the words

that blew off like mayflies moments

before we knew about them, or

the words that don't germinate or exist

in this particular universe at all? The

gaps in the clouds left by them

are my constant ellipsis,

my guardian ghosts.

Our hearts stand cracked together

in the absence of a working theory,

and so we pass each other in the street

and don't remember,

only remember the gap in everything,

through which we pour (like tw)(in yolks)

reluctantly into later days.