You come into me.
I’ve never invited you, still you come. The secret is, only the unbidden are welcome. You come as a refugee pretending to be a conqueror pretending to be a refugee.
I’ve seen it before.
It’s all I look at.
It’s everything I like.
I eat you. You’re tasty to me, like that big red apple to your foremother. Fulfilled ambitions and broken dreams go deliciously well together. Our juices run and mix.
I become yours.
I become yours when you see for yourself all the things you used to imagine, just to discover that lines from books and scenes from movies were all about me.
I become yours when you learn you can do what you want, always anything you want, and— sometimes—what you need.
I become yours when you give your own names to the stations of my body.
I become yours when you and I make a ritual: a breakfast at Tiffany’s, a miracle on 34th, you talkin’ to me? well, I’m the only one here.
I am only for you, each of you.
Alone as any one and only, as lonely as one offering another cheek for your veneration, I love you much more than you are able to love me, and, frankly,
I need you more than you need me.
I live in your dream of me, illuminated with my street lights to the point of total lucidity, and in your dream I dream you up.
As vile as Babylon, as holy as Shambhala, as misty as Avalon, myself I dream, but never sleep.
A day will come when the waters overflow and close over my head, then I’ll sleep, from the dark depth sending you bright visions and memories of what has never been.
But not in your lifetime, not on your life.
In this life, I draw you closer in my embrace, and I kiss you deeper and deeper and deeper. With the first kiss, I suck blood from your vein, and fill you with the bitter black fuel from a brittle blue cup.
With the second kiss, I bite into your flesh, and tie your ruptured sinew with my steel cables, hanging you above all suspended.
With the third kiss, I lick the marrow out of your bone, and put an electric floodlight inside your skull, so that from now on my beam projects from your sockets.
There, I have rebuilt you. I made you better than you were. Better, stronger, faster. Now you have the technology, go forth, take it further. Become somebody’s. If you can make it here… well, you know what I’m talkin’ about.
And when your transfigured shell escapes my orbit and settles elsewhere,
and some lesser god pipes the final tune on your bone that I hollowed out,
your last song will be:
my name, my name.