You Touched Me And Every Wall Inside Of Me Crumbled

Updated 8 years ago, January 4, 2017

In the years after you left, the kingdom
of my heart frosted over
the empires of affection fell to ashes
and your absence twisted into a forest
that thickened through the silence my bloodstream, pines of longing
stretching darkly towards the heavens, rivers of silence
carving oceans through my skin

In the years after you left I fell to ruins and then rebuilt every city
from the ground up,
Towers erected from our ashes of destruction
Planets pooling from the rivers of pain

The years after you left my body became
a reconstruction site, my heart a city
geared up for war

but

When you touched me, every branch inside of me snapped

Every ocean riled into a tsunami, every fault line broke apart
swallowing sprawling cities into their magnetic core

When you touched me every cannon fired
every door flew open
Every city of self-rejection crumbled
into an unrelenting pile of debris

When you touched me I remembered, in an instant
what existed
before the Big Bang of your absence
swallowed everything

Before the revolution of silence
before my mind won the civil war waged
against my heart, before the droughts arrived
to dry up all of the badlands of my body, before
The all-consuming empire of resilience
conquered the obliterated landmine of affection

You touched me
and every wall inside of me crumbled

every cloud cleared
every planet realigned across the skies

You touched me and the universe
rose back up to meet you where you’d left off
as though history could simply be rewritten
as though the West could be that easily won, as though time itself
had been sucked back up into your energy,

You
and the goddamned gravitational pull
of your smile.