If only I could map it out just once,
I'm certain you would finally know.

Because I can tilt your chin 
and name every light in the sky
when the night falls and we're left
with nothing but glows that are 
the equivalent of temporarily
ethereal ghostly glows.

I could name them all and tell you
that beauty does not last forever,
not in the ways humans chart it
with a desperate nostalgia for before
rather than holding what we have now,
quantified by charts and unstable
reactions that we play God with.

It's something that runs deeper 
than languages and numbers 
and the way our nerves become
accustomed to the way a feral touch
makes us know who we really belong to. 

If I could map it out just once,
I'm certain you would finally know.

But then I would tilt your chin 
and swallow the light from your eyes 
as we kiss and realize that while
beauty doesn't last forever
in the ways we try to shape it,
this runs deep in a place
we should never have full access to.

We would either destroy it
or lose the translation
by having too much control.

I could still listen to you name 
every glowing point heavenward
and all the ways they connect
and how that's what you wanted most,
not to just study that vast mysterious expanse,
but understand what it really means to us.

And you said that the stars and our bodies
were very akin to how we hold faith,
that we feel the presence of both
even when they remain apart and unseen.

You would then quietly straddle me
and gather my hands over your warm skin
with a blinding animal grace 
and devour me in a deep kiss,
you would press me to your breast
to hear the hidden universe
beating with so much life within.

You were already dripping nectar
as you suddenly took me inside,
you would begin to writhe and show me
the most ancient sacred dance,
the way we seamlessly merge 
is proof that beauty does not
need to last us forever.

It runs deeper in a place that remains
oblivious to time dimming the light 
that is harvested in your eyes,
I couldn't tell if it was neon
or a strobing rainbow or the glow
of a spectral star whose name 
even you cannot ever know.

Because we would either destroy it
or lose the translation if we were 
granted too much control.

I can still listen to the way you cry out
and know that it's the only time my name 
rolls off of a tongue as a prayer,
an incantation reaching depths in me
as I have traveled so deeply into you,

Such a trespass seals something between us
beyond wishing that all beauty
could just last us forever,
and when I burst in a breathless supernova,
the proof will always reside inside you.

That will say all everything you need to know.