A Poem for my Roommate on the Occasion of my Return

Hold me, embrace me, kiss me, I missed you, I love you, with you there’s no place else I’d rather be. Your heart is a glacier and mine is the root of the mountain.  Flow. Over me, around me, cover me, fill the valleys with ice and the cracking sound of thunder.  Bury the peaks, grind down the boulders, turn rocks into sand.  Breathe, advance, retreat, flow.

I drank your waters and they washed away my bridges, turned my coast into a wasteland, devastated my devastation, made my world anew.

There is a line that I can draw from the small of your back to the arch of your shoulder.  There is a line where our fingers connect.  There is the cracking sound of thunder and all these lines become tangled, like stone with ice, like water with life.  There is the cleft of your smile at the corner of your lips.  Flow.

Love flows like a flood and fills like an ocean and we, in our small boat, have barely left port.  Let’s sail, let’s sail, let’s sail away, to the islands beyond the horizon, to the caves in the depths where the sun goes to sleep, and to places where little birds have not learned to be afraid.  The future is not landlocked; the future is an open sea.

They lied when they told us we are worthless.  They lied when they told us the world is ugly.  They lied when they told us we deserve this.  They lied when they told us the walls they built around us are the boundaries of the world.  They lied but the truth, like Grímsvötn, erupted deep beneath the Vatnajökull, and washed them away.  And love is the boat and love is the ocean and, still, we’ve barely left port.

Hold me, embrace me, kiss me, I missed you, I love you, with you there’s no place else I’d rather be. Your heart is a glacier and mine is the root of the mountain.  Flow. Over me, around me, cover me, fill the valleys with ice and the cracking sound of thunder.  Bury the peaks, grind down the boulders, turn rocks into sand.  Breathe, advance, retreat, flow.