I spent the 1980s preparing for this
I spent the days refining my hurts
I invested heavily in the spirit
so that when I met you
I could behave like the perfect child
and sulk
and fall to my knees
and be undone
and pass it off as poetry

I spent the 1990s finding god
and when the decade passed
I closed with Arthur Schopenhauer
and Fyodor Dostoevsky and Albert Camus
and the music of Spanish Harlem burning
so that I could pretend to have a human heart
and act heartlessly with the excuse of learning
what it meant to be so utterly condemned,
incarnate,
like you

I spent the new millennium undoing everything
losing god
losing time
making love
giving up
being so melodramatic
that when I met you I could pretend to be
the ruined man
lost in the fallen world
waiting to be saved by his woman
saved by his girl
but there is no ruined world
and there is no woman
just me
and the shapes and sounds beyond these walls
and your body and word
that do little more than
give me a reason to live
and yet remove my will to

I hope one day I will come to define beauty by another measure
but for now you are the extent of my longing
with the look of forever