For an anonymous prompt: "I nearly opened a box that said 'I love you' "

~

Drifting thoughts, whispers through the rain-drenched air today, sift like light

below the surface of seawater

undulating, a voice

glides across my sentience (words, echoes, senses, it's all a shade, a shape of matter swirled and woven into an essence, a being, you

in your effervescent heartbeat)...

What does it say about me if I keep finding your face contoured in the pareidolia of waves as they murmur over the sand? The surf and I, intertwining senses.

Maybe the consciousness billows in space like ribboned kelp in the murky ocean depths, humming frequencies, a cosmic whale song,

our hearts

like some sort of cohesion;

heartshapes in sand, words etched roughly, and my fingers call out to reach, to feel, to know,

yet we sift through this distance like light through the water surface, echoing, glimmers, and somewhere in the comfort of my ventricles, the feeling lingers — I love you.

© Anna S. 2024

photo and words © Anna S. 2024

We file howls of wolves right there on the shelf beside the fraying fishing net and the verdigris bust of someone bearded, someone of note once, yet now left

a mystery.

I see hearts billow like mist, seashore as melancholy as your mind...

Your breath ruffles the feathers of my imaginary wings,

glides over my scapulae and contours my shoulder, nape, and

I wonder if you wonder

what it would feel like when my heart belongs only to you.

© Anna S. 2024

I remember the echoes

whispering through the wisps of time, hints

of familiar yet far

so very far away, and yet so close I can almost

reach out and touch

your essence, you, your heart

under the moonlight, in the universe, we are

like stars

in a serenade of time.

© Anna S. 2024

Love in a Liminal Space

There is an epicness in the richness of a sigh, in a dreaming, sleeping mind that lets you see,

lets you be

condensation on the glass, and will you hold me like the water holds its spirit kin along the rain races, spinning drops of souls in their orbit, gliding along the very same

glass

of an inconsequential window in the universe.

© Anna S. 2024

Just feel, just feel, just feel, and I think it is so simple

yet the layers are much deeper than garnish,

much harder to reconcile a heart and a soul with everything and nothing.

If only you were like dusk at sea, serene and comforting around my shoulders.

© Anna S. 2024

The crickets chirp, sometimes.

I bob through days weightless, gravity

releasing its hold just enough

for it to seem like beautiful peace, then

pulling

on invisible strings

like a celestial puppeteer.

I hover like a hummingbird

in the vacuity of being, seeking out

your petals, your scent

via tuning into frequencies that hum

and trill

through everywhere and everything.

Everywhere.

Everything.

You are there. Somewhere.

I twiddle the dial of the cosmic radio,

listening, listening

for your heart's beat.

The crickets chirp. Sometimes.

© Anna S. 2024

listen, the aether hums, and I

hum as well, skin bare

as rain, layer upon layer

shed, washing away the longing

and the loneliness with the dregs of murky

paintwater, watching it swirl

down the drain, warmed

by the love within.

© Anna S. 2024

Oh moon, I beseech thee send me revelations,

I bequeath the ancient burdens away to the past of day

and revel in the truth of your knowing, belonging...

my heart is a like the dancing of sunrise colors, iridescent, like the parhelia grins

of the sky

and somnolent sighs of nature, beautiful,

and I billow with the leaves, branches,

and spirits of dryads.

© Anna S. 2024

Astrology

Seastorm-blue and a side of gray, of those irises, I still wonder;

somewhere, you orbit, a distant celestial body in a web of constellations and trajectories, asteroid belts and a heart, beating;

somewhere, you are math and particles, a tapestry and a traveler, flexing your muscles to remember how to fly

and yes, you too had wings once, we all did, before the mix and match diatom mosaics of time reshaped them;

somewhere, we orbit, and sometimes distance is only until our paths converge.

© Anna S. 2024

Wolf Moon

I linger, the moon veils in cloud and mystery;

a trance of its flow, whispering, murmuring and I forget all the renegade minutes...

tonight, they call her a wolf, howling to ignite a soul, or is it a heartstring pulled to evoke a memory unmade, a pondering

to recollect you from the folds of existence.

© Anna S. 2024

Mystical, that gaze within the clouds,

a nightly phantom, she haunts the minutes,

tracing our hearts

with her spectral opaline fingers.

It's a song, no, a serenade,

and I blow her a kiss

as my hairstrands billow

in the wind's touch.

© Anna S. 2024

My mind walks amidst the birches

swaying

with their branches, swaying like

a pendulum in its arcing orbit

to and fro

reaching for your touch,

reaching

for your presence.

© Anna S. 2024

Like flyaway hairstrands, a whisper

of a monsoon and the crescent moon

lets her essence ooze o'er the mind

I breathe

I exhale and inhale again, one

with the universe, one

with infinity,

simply being, my essence, this

energy, this love in me.

© Anna S. 2024

A white mare in the mist, her mane billowing in the grace of the wind, traces existence in the sand — imprinting hooves... feet... a bareform maiden,

I wade into the sea in a skinnydipping rite and let skin feel kindred to water, to salt, to the wild

nature

that writes legends in the sky.

© Anna S. 2023