Believe my voice to be brimming with secrets even if they speak only in clumsy common-place tongues to you, its sleep-sweetening notes borrowed from a distant clock striking midnight. Believe a song to live within every sentence, songs set to music by a window on a rainy evening. Not for you are words stripped from forgotten garlands or the flowers blooming on neglected hedges.  Believe it to be always in pursuit of the perfect word, the blue flower from a stranger’s dream that I want to offer you.  

Believe my eyes to be frozen in a permanently backward glance to the moment I first gazed upon you. Believe them to be casting about their glance a foot or two away from yours fixing on a passing pair of feet, an empty chair, a clean pane of glass, anything that douses the insanity the sight of you ignites. You send me cowering to dark corners still damp with dreams; to nights rife with premonition when sleep-replenished silence fills me with reproach me for every half-glance. Believe them to covet every smile you bestow upon eyes that aren’t mine, smiles that flit from face to face till it rests on mine for a single starving second.

Believe my heart to stop in high solitary places where all ceases but remembrance of you, breathing and yet not breathing like a sky grown old shooting stars unto eternity, burning and yet not burning like a candlewick that outlives all to tell the tale of a flickering flame drunk on its own light.

Believe my feet to be in quest of what the stars, the sun and the sky have long despaired of finding. The night shames the stars for cloaking you in a purple that does not justice to the nobility of that makes meeting your gaze a baptism by fire. The sun never wearies of weaving and unweaving raiment after golden raiment till perchance you wear a summer’s day as a ribbon upon your tresses dawn and unknot it at dusk. None can pay tribute to a beauty so innocent it would scarcely recognize itself in a mirror. Or paint a grey girlhood, its frozen frailty left intact by a reverent time, a beauty straight as a sunray, so straight that my poem dies sighing, not wishing to bend it into rainbows of subtleties.

Should you believe, stars would multiply in a multitude of births that leaves the sky no blue but only everlasting memory to burn.