Tea Water

Love was seeing you, see me.
It was me laying myself down
(a deliberate choice)
Onto the dark, wet earth
and willfully undressing
while you, unmoved and feigning patience, 

watched me place each piece
of clothing around my body
While you watched me unbutton and surrender
To you
All while I watched, as long as my eyes were still my own to claim,
You, watching me
Unzip my flesh and gladly peel
My ribs open.
I desired to show you every part of me, although I didn't exactly.
My flesh and bones lay around me
as a worn and deflated, discarded costume
with the faint impressions of a life once lived within it.
Then Love was you, I thought,
gathering what you could of me
(what you thought were the most important parts)
and wrapping the sullied, cold heavy pieces of me
in your jacket
and carrying them to a place you called Home
Where I would never consider pulling myself open
that way
again.
Where you painted onto my tongue, a story that was never meant to be mine.
Where you pieced me together with your purpose.
Then Love became me,
handing you your worn, familiar jacket
and sweetly kissing your forehead
walking naked from the waist down
wearing only a sodden wool cloak, soaked through,
into the ocean this time
to become a solute dissolved into the salt water
Not really knowing what would become of me
but knowing that the dark and quiet expanse of that unknown felt
the more desirable choice.
Death and love are as real and inescapable 

intangible and infinitely changing

infinitely beginning and ending
as the mist that becomes the cloud that shades the sun
that releases the rain that feeds the herbs and the rivers
that become the tea water I sip
as I sit alone
whole and waiting.