i.
several instances we remember in which we desperately wanted to be overtaken
by one force of nature or another;
we dreamt of hungry vines growing over, of
trees with our limbs for limbs stretching over buildings, unstoppable and
inhuman, always beginning
always reaching in and around
feeling what we could not fathom as we stared up from the storm grates,
crushed by glaciers,
eaten by the wild fires that loved us more than they could say
still bold we took that love for granted until all our chances were gone,
until all our chances were but ashes,
but ashes and in these we swam, we drove all the way down to where the skeletons stood like guards and the smoke still perfumed everything
and we did not speak,
only stared.
we only stared.

ii.
we were always just that;
we,
a great monosyllable that loomed in whatever light in which we cast it,
we who held like lovers onto the bodies with whom we conducted
the business of being born a human on earth;
we, those humans on earth.
we in the early hours of summer, watching the sun rise over the heavy cast eyebrows of sleeping giants breathing in
we in the cold sea with wine in our blood and our clothes stuck fast to our body
we woke late and kissed each other's skin and went on drives and didn't care and climbed mountains and didn't care and saw the distant lights, the grey stretch of life before us, the ache in our own bones and didn't care.
we preferred each other's company.
we did not want to be alone with our self,
simultaneously frightened by and voracious for the future,
simultaneously immobile and dancing into oblivion,
our self who was one but divided in a way with which we could not sympathize.
we pitied our self but we loved it,
like a sentiment, an artifact,
like something we had put on a shelf and would not need until much later, until

iii.
until we did.