Forget You Not

Forget You Not

Forget-me-nots in your hair,

As though I would ever forget you

Sunshine glints gold over your wildfire pelt,

Sweet breath of summer days

Sweaty palm in sweaty palm against a cool breeze

Mud streaked on your skin like comets

Blending with stretchmarks and moles

Birdsong in your laugh,

Loud, obnoxious, and wholly unlovely

And you startle away all the birds

Running after them

As though you, too, can take flight

You salvage a feather from the dirt

Stick it in your hair

You’d put the whole forest in there if you could

You laugh again, obnoxious, unlovely,

Turn back to the trees

I follow, of course I follow

I would follow you headlong off the map,

Helpless in your wake

You dance with animal grace

A wild flickering flame against a bonfire background

Like calls to like

Careful, dear, careful

I think you must be burning

You immerse yourself in the riverbed,

Reemerge with handfuls of silt

Grinning like a predator at the frogs

Stumble, trip, fall your way into catching them

My heart lies in your teeth in love

You have constellations in your eyes

Like you know them personally

No creature like you could come from this earth

And if there is a god I think it must be you Childlike wonder and fury both

Made of silken sunlight, made of birdsong

Made of feathers and forget-me-nots

You burn with divinity

Leaving your mark on everything in your path

Scorching us all in your orbitAnd maybe I have new scars

Maybe my hands char in your grasp

But the season is young

And the river is fresh enough

To take the heat from my flesh

Hold me closer, dear

I have fallen for the wild in you

Corruption

Crawling rot oh many legged

Spoiled and oiled so deeply infected

Love so deep it warps the soul

Love each breath that fills with mold

Lovely kisses that breed infection

Rampant sickness born in connection Love as an illness, love as curse

Love as contagion for better or worse

Rejoice you crawling things

Ye who skitters, ye who stings

Maggot knows corpse as human knows god

Blessed are things corrupted and odd

Obsessive and twisted cruel delight

Rotting oozing fungal plight

Love in the colony, mindless, eternal

Awash with chemical smell so maternal

Pathogen that warps and withers

Soon you'll see that not much differs

From man and corpse and fungal roots

The loving hum beneath your boots

Beckons to rejoin the earth

Love is bloody, death is birth