(published in Deathrealm Magazine, Issue # 26, Winter 1995/1996)
Would that I could explain what you have done.
Would that I could find the right words,
the right language, to speak the turmoil you have wrought.
I am exhilarated.
I am undone.
I am enthralled.
Yes, I am enthralled.
Enslaved. Held in bondage by amorphous fetters;
chained by the tenuous fibers of imagination and speculation.
You have awakened within me an awareness of possibility.
You have opened a portal through which I have seen
the realm of passion and the promise of rapture.
And I am captured, frozen like the deer
in the spotlight of the hunter,
unable to flee even facing the certainty
of my own destruction.
You have mesmerized me.
How?
Through which word or thought or deed
did I fall to your guile?
What magical sword did you wield
to cut through the armor of my insouciance?
When did you cast the enchantment that even now
tangles its threads of yearning about me,
tripping me, ensnaring me?
There are words I could use
in my meandering attempts to give shape to what you have done:
arouse, excite, inflame, ignite.
Competent words all, but lacking in
the depth and breadth and width of that in which I am lost.
Imagine, if you will, if you can, an infinite ocean of color
where every hue is a feeling, every shade a sensation,
every tint and tone and intensity an assault upon the senses.
Feel the tides, at once constant and everchanging,
eroding the shores of my reason.
Or perhaps not color, but sound.
Every touch, every breath of wind,
every texture an arpeggio
that dances upon the source of me,
ravishing my soul and mind,
making me, destroying me.
I am lost.
I am found.
I have become a thing of need, of want.
I desire.
I crave.
And that which I most crave,
I cannot have.
It is denied me, forbidden.
By that same spell in which you entangled my passions,
my regard, you shackled me with silken plaits of trust.
Bonds fragile as the character of the maker and the chained,
they hold me as no other might achieve.
Yet am I allowed to dream.
Through dreams may I yield to that gentle seduction, that allure.
Dreams are the land in which the forbidden is allowed,
the unattainable is reached, touched, and lost upon waking.
Waking is the forfeiture of dreams, the ruinous return to
reality
and denial and unfulfilled desire.
But I would dream, and dream again,
for that fleeting ecstasy,
that taste of culmination,
however brief.
With your words, you have sown.
In my dreams, I would reap.
Would that I could explain what you have done.
I cannot.
Would that I could find the right words,
the right language, to speak the turmoil you have wrought.