Beyond the haggard fires these daggered thieves with their ridiculous mirthless faces and miserable half-smiles hurl my way, beneath the thunderstorms of oncoming day and the silent rains of silencing evenings, past the beasts wracked by pain and bound by heated chains, I lay half-wrecked, my body twisted like shattered timbers, lungs wet and gasping like the wide-eyed fish strung up in light. But I spit blood, shuddered both in fever and haunting cold, discharge the fentanyl from my veins and the deep creases pressed into my brain, and with the last of sputtering strength I manage to mutter your name. A biblical allotment, one I press to the ceiling of my enclosing bedroom with the heft and spirit of my wavering body. I do not need to be breathing much to breathe well and I do not need to breathe well to breathe at all, and with only half a breath I can pin your face and forgiveness to the rotating sun and stars of my lavender-scented heaven, an icon to crawl toward and measure myself against. I need not to know the final shape to myself, to ask from my future self a little lent strength, that the triune and untroubled peace we once felt might succor my in its lofty arms, holding Heaven high like Atlas at the bottom of the world, below not in disrespect but in foundation, like those pilaster legs like stony trunks might gleam exposed for you, aware and wanting to give to your open stated desires. I am a diseased thing, my body and my mind, and I shamble in disrepair through the figments and fragments of my partially-constructed life, but even a half-blind golem can still see by those twin lights, yours and theirs, like distant suns pinned to the horizon. I am not called to understand; in humility, I lay down the crown of my once-proud mind, seek not gem nor diadem. I am called to witness, to love, and to walk. I, once a pilgrimed heart, now on pilgrimage set forth, with no love of wandering but now a flightless bird set to rest upon the branches of your olive trees dressing your verdant hills. My heart feels fear no more at the presence of your warming dawn, trembles no longer at the thought of forsaking embraces counter to your own; in those twin temples, each facing the other, I have found a ground in which to bury my heart, heavy with seeds, and hurl those sprouting limbs to distant heaven, every blossom a confessing tongue, every fruiting body a liberation song. Let me drown in your waters. Let me speak in tongues, dress myself in fine clothes, take you dancing, speak your name free in the lyric-strung air of warm evenings. Let me declare a sainted solidity, that in three bodies a peace be forged and in velvet dream a silent flag unfurled, billowing and wild, the color of your eyes.