I am breathless by the eyes of the stars. They stare at me as hungrily as I stare at them; as if I am a fox with big brown eyes of curiosity and mysterious innocence, and they--they are little birds cooing at the toil and wreckage of the earth. With unorthodox voices that haunt you in your sleep, they sing to you a melody that only your deep and cachet soul can hear. It's a sound of spirit and pure submersion.
The stars are lingering poets in a graveyard of Romanticism and abandoned abbeys where the winter sun rises slowly, palely, personally. It always seems they are for your soul, and yours alone. I am exasperated with teasing provocation when they see me--like an almost lover lingering near my lips but never quite pushing them against my own. They tickle my insanity in a sweet and sadistic way. Yes, the stars--against common belief--can be cruel and devouring creatures.
They can cut you open with an double-edged fork and shovel portions of your heart into their stomachs.
They don't need a reason to stop, either.
But they are kind. Truly the stars are kind crackles of light illuminating our dark world. Like lanterns they path the way into our souls without a thought of obligation weighing in their arms--it's what they are made to do, I guess.
Tonight my breath was caught between their warm arms and spun into a "quintessence" of rapturous awe. I felt my chest heave and ho, fall and rise, jump and sleep, jump and sleep all over again until I felt with a real palpable yearning to kiss somebody. Did I wish to kiss the stars? A boy? The cold crisp night air slapping rose petals on my cheeks? Does it truly matter who or what my lips yearned for when the impulse of loving life and breathing overcame my senses? (Overcame myself even?)
You see sometimes I yearn to be alone. I yearn for it so fiercely I forget what great fear and loneliness most people find in it. So tonight, a boy drove steadily through a thin road drenched in nightlight, as I ached to reach for his hand and hold it tightly, as the small rattling car was filled with the sound of unfinished stories and people who couldn't compliment each other more perfectly. First a girl with thick curling rays of sunlight and ridged cheeks to match her merry spirit. Second a boy who lost his lion's mane and found true friends instead. Third a boy with exquisite blue eyes that sparkle like dripping water on a sunny day and strong hands as cold and meticulous as branching ice crystals. Last a girl with tangling hair and curious fox-like tendencies. She is the misfit. The first is the light source. The second the never-failing anchor. And the last a flame.
There we were late into the small abandoned world around us, traveling through soundtracks and cutting through the dead, silent autumn night to venture around the forsaken bones of a cement factory. The sky was partly-cloudy but speckled with bright stars and all I felt my pounding heart say to me was, "Chase those blasted stars"!
I climbed and climbed, often getting lost from the group, but finding my own strength and bravery with each stolen step toward the pinholes of heaven. I wasn't afraid--I had no fear for the strange words and pictures left by humans miles and miles away probably sleeping or doing something I could only wonder about. I wasn't afraid of the shadows creeping around me, twisting my hair with the quiet wind and collapsing into piles of crumbled stone. I didn't even fear the lingering idea that followed me up the broken building and slept beside me as I stretched out on top of a narrow pillar curved perfectly for a human body--"Do you really love that boy you talk about in your sleep? Or do you tell yourself you must?"
I don't know stalking beast of quiet devouring.
But I know, as surely as I did when I asked each of my friends if it truly is possibly for someone to love you as much as you love them, that love exists. I know that pounding hearts, stolen breaths, and endless nights of tears and poets and exhaustion of emotion are what we live for--we live for love or we do not live a life at all.
I sat up at the top of the world (or perhaps only an abandoned cement factory littered with thoughts and words and four wandering people) for who knows how long before my friends followed me and broke the silence I had grown to love more than fear.
We talked of life.
We silently pretended we had a clue.
The sun-ray asked each of us, "What's one thing you want to do before you die?" We all stayed silent until one admitted it was love they wanted, and then we laughed for truly that was the answer we all wanted to say but somehow lacked the courage to. I responded, "I want to feel love as pure and raw as Victor Hugo." I want a love that I know will love me back.
So we stared at the stars and acted like we had a clue and that we, so small and frail, were running the show. But the more I look up at the stars, the more I sit alone and fall madly in love with the quiet, the more I realize I never was running the show--and I never will.
What an exquisite thought that is.
-k.p.b.
November 5, 2015
2:00AM (When poet's are alive and awake)
