Gravity

You are dying even as you do not die,

a disease apart from your physical self.

Were it a cancer, an unworthiness, even then,

I do not know which sympathies would keep.

Each of us has their blame,

your skin mapping an ocean of morphine,

mine the illusion that I have no skin.

Somewhere, there is a longitude that splits us in two,

a central horizon neither half can achieve.

It's as if without the stabilizing reach,

the consequential balance after grasping air,

we could slip into the folds of our earth, consumed.

What does it matter

that I do not hate you when I try

I fear love as a complicit act--

a black space earning its emptiness

by inclusion, where even the most vacant body

is full with every portion.

Father,

the further you shrink,

exchanging your flesh for greater weight,

the denser your image becomes,

an invisible mass of years compacted.

I wait for you to reach the compelling point

at which, in your paper skin, you will only burn,

and I, encircling particle, must choose

to sleep in your gravity or be thrown from it.