DEVOUR ME, O DISTANT LOVE

Love sits on the windowsill, watching, / watching, / watching
not close enough to touch, yet its breath melts the frost,  
soft as a dying ember, cruel as the wind that snuffs it.  
 
Oh, I have seen love / gnawing the bones of the moon,  
worshipped it in the fever of hands that mistake  
devotion for the slick pulse of need
tell me, tell me, where does love end, and lust begin?  
When do lips become razors, and kisses become graves?  
 
I have kissed a ghost in the shape of a lover,  
felt their breath stitched into my ribs,  
and called it devotion. Called it fate.  
But love does not come home, it lingers,  
it haunts, it perches between throat and hunger.  
 
Lust wears the same perfume as longing  
a scent that lingers on sheets,  
that stains the skin with feverish scripture.  
And yet, love, / love, / love
it is a wound that hums lullabies,  
a flood that never reaches the roots.  
 
Let me love you the way ruin loves the cathedral
so sacred, so brutal, so inevitable.  
 
Tell me
is it heaven, is it hell,  
or is it just the way the heart breaks beautifully?