Muse (For B, who tried to make a poem out of me)

I confess you grabbed me by my collar, shook the sleep out of my drifting body and left me altogether speechless, tongue-tied and clueless, wondering how I must reply.

I confess I am flattered a poet of your intensity should find such bludgeoning beauty in my insecure, black body, that you should be mesmerized by my smile, that you should drown in the murky depths of my eyes, that you are probably drowning still with no hope for salvation.

How must I rescue you from this poem you are making of me?

Confess, B, that I am but a figment of your creative ecstasy. A half truth, a bold, distorted fragment of the real, carved from malleable clay, fashioned by your crafty eyes that peer into the soul of all matter in their compulsive quest for poetry.

Confess, B, that I am but a poem inside your head, one that escapes syntax, simile, economy. A poem you must pursue because it drives you mad, possesses you, etches its essence all over your hungry, prophetic tongue and remains unattainable because you can see, believe, but can never touch, grasp, contain, own.

Confess, B, that I am but a vision inside your soul, a stark naked angel wandering the smoggy terrain of your prophecy, a morning vision that will vanish by noon, that is vanishing so soon, vanishing as we speak, slipping away softly, on tipytoes, when you are asleep, while your body is breaking into the seductive arms of some other product of ecstasy.

Confess, please, that it will vanish in spite of all your pleas, your eager appeals to patron saints of memory.

This is how it will unfold,

The Vanishing;

It will begin with the forgetting of the curve of my smile and will steadily swallow all the intent in my semi-passionate eyes. This will follow; the sound of my voice blurring into oblivion. You will try to make it reappear but will hear only the sound of your own voice paralyzed by poetry, screeching in the deafening stillness of night.

You will shriek at the sheer wonder of this pure poem you have made of me vanishing into obscurity, too exuberant to have been true, too real to have been imagined, so incredibly out of reach, so unreasonably ideal, so fucking beautiful it makes you want to weep.