Tantalizing perdition, barely out of reach
For your fiery torment I yearn
The damned suffer without nuance
In flames; only flames
Comforting in their consistency
Serene in their simplicity
The agony a mindful reprieve
Cooking flesh a catharsis from the hell
Of living.
I am stunned to look at you
Transcending any standard of beauty, my attraction is intuitive, primal
All my animal instincts draw me toward you
Light hits you and highlights your perfection
The shadows it casts shapes indescribable wonder
You sit nearly haloed in divine grandeur
Painters and poets spend lifetimes trying to capture you
Their greatest achievements weak prostrations to your inexpressible reality
Shall I too try to capture you?
You offer no resistance, elegantly enduring my efforts
My attempts are embarrassing, ridiculous
Is it hubris or foolishness to have even tried?
Or simply human
Who are any of us in comparison to your eternal stature?
The world moves too quickly
My capacities insignificant
You are indominable in your wild independence
I attempt surrender to the awe of simply being in your presence
All thought of capture affirmed as insufficient, but the humility to abandon the desire of a lifetime beside you is agonizing
Our relationship is a gift from you to me, but do I have the grace to accept it in impotence?
The train enters a tunnel and the moment passes, forcing acquiescence
The evanescence of you will have to be enough
I assume you had a life before we met
Filled with love, pain, victories, and defeats
But for me your story began when I entered into it
A transient visitor of your present
Your past existed solely in stories, your future in dreams
It’s alluring to assume that your life became frozen in time when I left, a cross-section of a whole calcified into my comfortable solipsism
.
I know now you had a life after that insular present
Filled with more pain, your victories warped to accommodate it
My solipsism violently denied
.
You bore your cross while my back was turned
Not our sins, but mankind’s shame, weighed heavy on your shoulders
Stumbling toward your needless crucifixion
.
The news of your passing is no gospel
A martyr without a cause, a death without passion
Your suffering brings no redemption; we are not yet saved
We continue to drift along without you, oblivious
Your glory exists only in memory of the names once held by statistics
.
In gratitude for that memory,
RIP Vir Thongpheng, February 28, 1979 – April 6, 2023
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