the interweb journals of oliver phillip nicholas.

if i'm to speak my heart:
if i'm to take that turn which
orients one wing down towards the floor of the earth,
pulls the other wing up towards the cieling of the sky,
and when righted points me in some new direction...

then i would admit to this page that I love you,
that I wake with you on the tip of my tongue,
my arms wrapped around your memory and
my hands still clasped hard at the small of your back,
lingering in my lungs the scent of your neck...

and if i'm to make this admission freely,
behind a pane of glass that separates me from the sky,
dulled by an obvious sunday rain,
wrapped as I am in the sheets of my own bed with
a sleeping cat as my only witness...
if i'm to make such a bold admission to a page in a journal...

then i must admit also that i went to sleep in the same position,
lost to reminiscence and fantasy,
the space between us and the places where there is no space,
our last touch,
our next embrace...

so it appears that if i were a linguist,
I may remark that thoughts of you frame my sleep like a
parenthetical,
curved around my dreams that they might suffuse those hours as
an orthography,
a vast eye in a yet infinite storm...

and too, it seems that if i tilt my head to the other side,
and squint or open my eyes just so,
I might come to remark that the curves you
circumscribe
around my dreams don't only demarcate what lies inside;
that with a simple inversion of vision,
a twist in perspective,
I see that you just as easily contain the
waking moments of my days...
such that I cannot distingiush whether you
describe or
are described by
the hours of my life, and I trust that
it could not possibly matter,
because all these hours are the sweetest for it.

so i might eventually recognize
that no matter which way my head is oriented,
and no matter how shallow or deep my eyes are focused,
that the image always is the same which projects onto
that most precious nerve, to be subsumed into the electric
storm of our mind's mind:
the expansive vision of your slender frame,
radiant in the light of a sun that shines behind one iris,
resplendant in a moon's glow behind the other.

such that in the end, my Love,
when the parts are summed, and
the total proportions measured,
I should have no choice but to admit:

that i choose to wake to your glow;
that i would surround you in your sleep.

my heart's mind holds a million thoughts,
a million ideas, staged across the spectrum from
iota to universe,
a million words, magically arranged and subdivided into a million sentences,
a million questions, reasons -
a million heart beats -
and they all, every one of them,
funneled from my lungs,
arise from my chest through the chamber of my throat,
to crawl their way across the cavern of my mouth...

and just before the light:
just before i loose these larval notions, fully formed, upon the world -
winged beasts with power and strength and frightful solidity -

i realize that i am talking to an ocean who no longer calls me kin,
and like a mountaineer who's pushed his luck just before the climax of his conquest,
my mouth will not open,
and these words i cradled from birth submit and die quietly on the tip of my tongue