Elements of Essence, Collab By James Kelley and Katherine Wyatt
I am walking in your footprints again. My bare feet are so small when contained within the imprint of your own We have walked this soft grassy road, side by side. Now I walk only with your essence. I feel the brush of your skin and callouses of your hands on my body. Such soft reveries. Its inevitable conclusion is bleeding into the clay and tall grasses beneath our ghostly steps.
I am Earth and you are Sky, and the wind carries the daily exchange of our nature on soft songs. I no longer chase the zephyrs that swirl upon the low grounds. They carry leaves and debris that settles back onto the clay beneath us. We both see one another clearly, but somehow do not have clear vision when it comes to our own storms.
I am rain falling sideways, pushed by your reaching gusts. Locusts swarm in the eyes of my pondering caress; we are a plague of fathoms at the foot of a swallowed sea. You are the calmness of Earth’s depths, my rage punishing your shores. You are the beauty of my destruction, the ebb and flow of my tormented purity. I only wish that I could feel your weight upon me again, holding me at rest.
But the scales of time’s sandy tick have tilted, leaving me crazed and undiluted. I watch your limbs sway, your leaves break free and wander, searching for the source of my prayers, and I blink. The night swells in my breast and I feel your fault lines shake in the bones of what is left.
This feral land is the bedchamber of our lovemaking. The faces in the trees are watching us. We give them life as they dream us into being. The soft waters of the bayous are a song hanging in thick bayou air. We are like water. I close my eyes and you are within me.
Our bodies are trapped in the temporal. Our minds caught in patterns we do battle with perceived realities. Yet your spirit is etched beneath my eyelids. You are never far. We are writing poetry across oceans of time. Lovers in every form. Weaving stories of creation and destruction upon each individuation. Flesh as a vessel, is only bound by time. My heart is heavy with shadows. Yet together, we are Fire and Light.
We are the eternal design of nature’s fury: the break and the fall, the flow and the pull, the thrust and the splash of kindling spirit. We are all, and we are one, and I feel your feet within mine as we walk down, further upon the grassy road of our story. Your hand is soft, mine broken and bleeding. But you will heal me, you always do. For you are the wind that molds me, the crash breaks me, the flame that purifies our bond, and the water sending ripples on the shore of every world in which we choose to play our songs.
(c) James Kelley and Katherine Wyatt 2014
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