Creature Speak

If you are not afraid, my love, then I am happy for you.  

If your legs are strong to keep you standing in the fire, the storm, in the shifting currents of dark water, then would you hold my trembling cup?  

My hands are shaking too much to keep the medicine from spilling and I don’t want to ruin your suit.  I have no apron or smock to cover you, and I seem to be making a mess.  

Blood for reds and tears for blues, I paint the floors and walls and sheets with my fears and sorrow, passion and dreams.  And you dive into the pool of unseen things.

What will you find where there is no light, where darkness is so deep it steals the sparkle from your sheen and your lamp is buried deep beneath your surface?

Will it be worth it when you, too, are stripped to the core, when you cannot find your clothes, your masks, your skins, your tools for charting a course for our ascent?  

When the light is smothered within you and it’s not enough for two to see, will you stand naked in the darkness with me?

Will we shake together until the lies fall off?  The Great Deception of mis-identity when we believed what they said about us, when they misplaced their power and had to come for ours.  

When their suffering was so big they couldn’t bare to see our wounds, and so they did all they could to hide us and make us small, and we bled in closets for rooms.

Will you let me be small while you stand tall?  Or will you fall into the tiny world of sprites who collect bruises and scrapes, gashes and heartbreaks, to keep them safe in my lungs, my guts, my spine, my perception of life?

Maybe I can stretch beyond the cages to grow freely enough to hold you up when you waiver in the temptation to shrink and make a little home in the shadows with no room for your size.

And maybe you will break the cages left inside me apart and free my heart for your prize.

And maybe we can build a mansion for a temple to be our house, and clear out the structures of doubt, the miniatures we trip on, always asking us to second-guess the magnitude of our ever-unfolding truth, 

the span of our wings, the strength of our flame, the merging light of our love, so grand a star it casts a shadow upon the sun.

Copyright © 2021, Sheyorah Naify