Ceaseless
for Tanya
I’ve loved you for moments, hours, months, years. . .
Eternity?
Something ceaseless,
something like silver lotuses, crystal frogs,
ruby-leaved pines, opal lions, sapphire sunsets,
hued biomes underneath a candelabra in the troposphere,
biomes underneath pearl clouds pierced by amber flames.
Something akin to endlessness.
I want more, more than your temporal existence,
more than memory that became a dilated dreamscape
where seconds were centuries, you standing
near oblivion, a force outside time.
I want to hold you in memories that never existed,
in portals opened by an undiscovered science
or spiritual dawns awakened by a secret seance.
I want to consume your being with one glance
and expand that image into a never-ending collage,
flowing across worlds that could have existed,
timelines where we had alternate psyches,
alternate minds tessellated through endless stretches,
personalities where we recollected foreign thoughts,
thoughts where you hated me, or loved me so much
we could have died, thoughts where you couldn’t care less.
Hands, faces, fire, jewels, countries, flights
crumpled into a paper ball, burned on a shrine.
There are days when I want to erase my existence
from you, to never feel warmth, flesh, emotions.
In this space where I cease, newness germinates,
lands, feelings, ideas, memories more gorgeous
than anything that would have vegetated had I
been there, synaptic pulses and dopamine,
chemicals overflowing in your brain without me.
I am a gate that keeps other hurricanes
from rampaging through your reality,
a wily guardian who has diluted an essence
and made it persist in a lone possibility.
Today, as it stands, I am the ghost who constructs
cities and landscapes in your imagination, animates them
with scenes pouring from lush cinematography,
a burden that I carry outside imagery, outside language.
So I want to destroy everything that ever was
and recreate it into a sensorium museum
displaying our memories and possible futures,
exhibits that could be absorbed in a passing.
There are instants in myth that warped imaginations
and instants in calculation that resulted in world-bending tech.
I would suck out the creative marrow from every bone
of every genius and wipe it out for a single, ecstatic memory.
Efren Laya Cruzada is a poet who was born in the Philippines and grew up in the small town of Alice, Texas. He studied English and American Literature and Creative Writing at New York University. He is the author of Grand Flood: a poem. His poems have been published in several journals, most recently in The Ekphrastic Review and Tiny Seed Literary Journal, with work forthcoming in The Tiger Moth Review, The Stardust Review, and The Closed Eye Open. He now resides in Austin, Texas with his partner Tanya.
