Aion

It was unsightly, really,
and I should have looked away,
but there you were—
after so many years of imagining and wondering and longing—
perched on the edge of a table split
by an unseemly brew of time and too many uncaring hands,
imbibing the honey-golden liquor of the weary and vitriolic
with the same genial, whole-hearted enthusiasm
of which you used to reserve for the sun and moon and stars.
It’s a toxic masquerading as a tonic
and I thought that you’d have known—
after a childhood of dropped-glass cuts
and thunderclap slurs—
about the way the poison slides down into
the spaces between your ribs with the black-tar viscosity of
hazy back rooms, half-forgotten faces, and never learned
names, and scarifies the flesh and bone around it.

Spiral-bound notebooks of unfinished poems
and intricate constellations interwoven with the naïve,
limitless aspirations of the young
and hopeful burrow into my mind and plague
every thought. And I wonder,
how many distillations—
how many day-dream nights under an open, infinite sky—
will it take to purify the rot festering beneath your skin,
to reach the alchemical quintessence of who
you used to be—of who you still are—
somewhere behind the glassy, vacant eyes
and painted-jester’s smile?

You turn to the right, or maybe
you’ve just lost your balance,
and for a brief moment—
a single, ephemeral eternity—
you’re looking directly at me. Confusion
deliquesces into recognition into an expression
halfway between horror and relieved desperation,
and I can see the questions I’ve been too afraid to ask
struggling to claw their way from your throat.

And then it’s gone.

A full glass has taken the place of
the empty one in your hand, and
you don’t know—can’t know—where it came from,
but it hardly seems to matter because
you’re laughing again with the same vulgar emptiness,
the same twisted travesty of a lilting cadence
I once knew by heart,
that drew my attention in the first place,
and it strikes me that those nights lying
in awe below a never-ending sky,
whispering childish promises that we really shouldn’t
have expected to keep, are the closest to
forever we’ll ever reach.

Aion: Greek god of unbounded time