beautiful. temporal

She draws up a bath

The leaky faucet drips continually into the foot end of the tub. Repetitive, clockwork, industry.

Heartbeat.

Primordial.

The rusty joints and dusty baseboards, the tired linoleum all creak and crank, yellowed,

From a quieter world now gone

This room designed for a different era, groans happily under warm water

Time is familiar with warm water

She is the guest in this old building

She sighs long over the water, which responds with blooming

exponential ringlets

Reproducing in perfect order, towards her reddened feet

Single cells rapidly descend grasping one another, forcibly inclined to join the dance

complexity

Birthed from breathing.

her body stirs, which long she’s loathed

she nods forgiveness, and mercy to her skin

She is walking through a hallway with friends when she comes across a weathered face

Eyes lock like magnets then repel oily water

certainty of youth and God lie within her own

Though death and life are in those eyes, her failure to recognize the depths of time prevent reception

Sinking deep

Tonight God is mystery. Wilderness beyond her. Dangerous. Foreign.

Tonight God is too close

Lips stirring quietly against the warm water,

Half submerged, amphibious between two worlds

She knows that life is piercing, feels it in her side

Beauty and affliction

A lost soldier in a foreign country, writing letters to a nearly forgotten lover

She listens at the creaking universe that does not know her from any other,

Her body beautiful. Temporal.

Repeated breaths and lilting tongues.

Her prayers grow green and cold magenta lamentations

If I’m loved, things are different

I cannot prove one more thing.

If you came running, things are different

She unstops the drain, the evolving waves shudder, tumult.

A universe destroyed at her feet, her body levitates momentarily

Like resurrection.

the water drains slowly.

Impressions remain but the tub stays in wait