Before You

I look at all the pretty colors.
I am enthralled by their innate beauty.
I realize I was color blind before,
Before you…
Now colors (your colors, colors of you)
Swirl about me in a mad maelstrom
Of fear and love
And fear of love.
I am open to you,
A young bud blossoming to your touch,
Your breath;
My thirst quenched by the sweat of you,
My hunger soothed by the taste of you.
That desert I was trudging through
Has been flooded by your existence.
The darkness that had swallowed me
(So much that it seeped into my pores,
Became my bone marrow)
Has now been absolved by the
Possibility of you.
I was safe and empty,
Before you…

Now your scent courses through my blood,
Rushes to my brain,
Clouds my judgment;
Like if I jumped out of this window of my soul,
I wouldn’t shatter…
Perilous thoughts,
We both know that I would.
I would shatter into a thousand shards of broken heart,
Like that glass you threw against the door that night…
The night I almost let you go.
The problem with being so high
Is that the fall would probably kill me.
When the peak has been reached,
Well, you know the cliché…
There are only so many mountains to climb.

My lips quiver,
My heart trembles,
My thighs shiver.
I’d forgotten what that was like,
Before you…

The future that yawned empty before me
(That is before you),
Now is filled with your eyes,
Your heart,
Your face,
The sight of which I’ve grown accustomed to,
The thought of which now befuddles me.
Oh that darkness,
That comforting sorrow,
The gloom I had grown to love,
Before you…

I had nothing to lose in that night,
For all was nothing,
And that’s what I had.
I had safety and absolution, then.
Now I have you,
Now I have my heart,
Now I have fear and doubts,
I have dreams and fragility.
I finger the temptation to go back,
To curl up in that womb of loneliness…
To what I didn’t have
Before you…

Too late now, though.
What I’ve discovered in you
Pulls me like the white light of death,
Promising better places,
Petrifying, nonetheless.
Even if I wanted to,
I couldn’t go back to that time,
That place of nonexistence that was my life,
Before you…


Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Ann Lopez

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