When Love Isn’t Enough

I have never known a love like you,  

I’m terrified I will never know it again. 

I want to love myself with the same embrace, 

but I can’t feel my own skin wrap around itself. 

I long to feel yours, 

and I long to know you more. 

I’m riddled with agonizing questioning, 

bewitched by absolutes. 

My body is the size of every galaxy, 

and the gravitational pull of my grief  

rips every star out of the sky. 

But sometimes a love the size of every world  

isn’t enough, 

and sometimes the deepest love you’ve ever known 

hurts you from the inside-out.  

No one ever said love was easy, 

but they could have warned me of it’s  

blades and glory. 

I’m ripped open.  

My galaxies are spilling out of every pore. 

Stars scatter out of my eyes. 

Entire solar systems rain heavy on my mind. 

Moons fly out of my nostrils,  

and the finite universe within my porous skin  

slips from beneath the bend. 

I want your skin on my skin. 

I want your biggest organ holding you in 

to take me in your arms and tell me the story again 

of how your universe  

got inside  

that alabaster boundary, 

and how every last star in the sky 

rose from our own blood. 

Tell me again about the love that let it rise. 

Tell me again about the parting seas, 

and how every last speck of rock 

floating in space  

holds the recipe for life. 

But come back to me. 

Come back to me, 

and hold my universe in yours, 

and promise me that you’ll see through  

the pigmented boundaries, 

and see the vulnerability of every speckled star. 

See  

this interdependent body, 

home to trillions 

of microorganisms. 

See 

the vast universe  

behind my scars and indentations.  

See me, 

and my story, 

and the story  

of an unbroken chain 

of on-going-ness 

that binds me to the first living cell,  

3.8 billion years ago.  

See 

life longing for itself  

in my laughs, 

and my everlasting love for you.  

When love isn’t enough, 

see through my porous skin,  

and collide these infinite forces 

within this infinite space.

Let our shoulders go numb 

with time passed. 

Let our muscles grow fidgety, 

and promise me that you will hold me 

until the planets come back from round the bend.