Star Death

I had never seen myself until I saw you—

burnt copper hair curling against your parchment skin,

ice-gray eyes observing me from your infinitely distant,
isolated self. I was an anomaly shining

from the deep space of our world

and floating before your telescope vision,

laughing and twisting my hair over high shoulders

before turning from the sun into my own shadow.

I turned to you.  Whispering under the low hum

of an airplane engine, I felt my harshly painted colors

seeping out of me, sucked slowly into the gravity

of your empathetic black hole.

I had become only the choice:

to inhale the power of others

or to pull them through me,

to push them to the other side
transformed.