Portrait Two

It was the deep abyss of night
I wished you could have seen:

The way I stood on the front lawn,
Eyes lost in dark impressions,
Fixed on the black-curtain skyline.

And the way the bottle shifted
Loosely in my hand,
As I poured the whiskey down my throat,
And it cascaded numbly into void.

If you could have seen the stars,
Arranged in the sky like an erased expression,
Suspended above me in a confession of vacancy,
The image I inhaled with my blank stare…

Or behind me, how He watched through the window,
His gaze tracing my careful outline
With such cold precision,
His dull voice calling, almost to wonder
What immensity had swallowed me,
As I searched the darkness in secret prayer.

Maybe you could have seen, while I stood there
Naked beneath His old towel,
The way the whiskey couldn’t redefine
The Shape of Him,
Or forge from the shadows of my emptiness
The whisper of something full and rare.

If you could see me every night,

The way I Climb through this silence,
Reaching across space with my smoothed skin-

I promise you I shed my soul
Before I let him in.

I wish you could see the ways I pay for you-
The elegant motions, the hollowed-out insides-
All the places I am Empty,
Having found my Self a dark place to hide.