Pledged Letters

I swear to everything that is in me, everything I still hold on to as God

I felt we saw each other

I felt souls beginning to rip, the fear juicing in the seams of hope

I felt spiritual nudity

I feel like Edmond Dantes the moment he told the judge

The name of the addressee of the letter he pledged to carry

I say this not in a flood of love, but hope

I felt your scariness as your fear and repression of love

I tore like a kindred serpent calling for and pushing away love

I felt the fury in your embrace pressed against the walls of my home

I felt power in it like time colliding in us asking

Do you see?  Do you hear? 

I am ransacked as a madman in this Chateau d’If

Pondering what it is I am so ignorant

I am waiting for the priest to rouse from the tunnels beneath this stone

In the questions I have not thought to ask I see love in your heart

I see your decline of such a charge and see my hope dash against rocks

The waves crashing swallowing the salty wedge of God’s cackle

I see these moments like the stars knowing some of them expired

In time’s sluggishness to light my perception 

My brain bartering with the emotional dice of why my poet would be drawn to such a heart

A tower’s blind window, a scent of redolent contradiction,

A sun that cannot warm skin behind these walls

Words I am unable to direct to the page like vagabonds that travel in your curves

I pray for your repetition of the letters I have offered

As if I was not an embarrassing toil, but love’s ghost whispering from a future

You will recognize in time, by God, like my faith returned

I pray to let this compulsion to solve release

As it has never been in my hands to be the spiritual dove of your pleasure

Being the chooser rather than the chosen and in so doing

The empowerment of my soul to know I am not a madman

Merely a servant doing what was required