i touched you, oh untouchable ariadne,
while the faces of long-dead heroes watched
from the wall of ivy, and the moon bled
and time stood still around us
and the lamps bathed us in gold
and music none other could hear swelled
and crashed
and everything danced
and fell apart
and reshaped itself anew
we were there for the birth of worlds
and are there still
fingers laced
across the aeons
as the grand procession passes by
fiery crosses and black spirals and shapes with more dimensions
than man has yet learned to count
flashes of white and red
and a curtain of stars
and i glanced your way and saw you had no face
and wear many faces
faces of all those i have loved and lost and not met and never will meet
and it’s okay because you’re here beside me
all of you
and at one point i crawled inside you
followed the flow of your blood
as it raced through the labyrinth
of veins and muscle and bone
and found your innermost emptiness
blacker than blackest night
and wept for you held nothing from me
and i did not have to pretend to be something i’m not
i too could just be
empty
and full of limitless possibility
and the waves washed against the rocks
as we lay on the beach dreaming
and sometimes you would stir
and look at me as if you had returned from a long journey
from a lifetime of being someone else
and did not yet recognize me

and i knew the question you would ask
before it left your lips
for i asked it of you
at the center of the maze
and when i found you in that other place
after cutting you down from the tree
and when i held you and tried to stop your wrists from bleeding
looking down at myself in the shard of broken mirror you used
except when you asked it there was confusion
as you stared past this man mask
at the great bull horns that rise from my head
and the shadows they cast upon the sooty and graffitied alley wall behind us