what’s in a name, you ask?

a love poem.

if the shortest poem is a name,
why does it not stop
slipping off my tongue?
like a fish bone caught in my throat,
like a pencil falling in a vacuum —
silent, endless
like the longest word in the dictionary,
it stretches on and on
down to the tip of my tongue,
now honed with practice,
so nothing else flows the same.
water moves down to find
the same letters reassembling,
as if every second spent
not saying it
is wasted breath.
your name is time’s inevitability.
it began as a call of love,
then turned to longing.
now it’s something else entirely:
a pocket universe
where physics fail,
and gravity forgets its hold.
each time your name escapes me,
it rises,
skyward,
into a blue too vast to return from,
toward a sun in perpetual rise.
it becomes cloud,
and rains back down on me.
can you see it now?
can you hear it well?
your name is the only prayer i know.
the only God i believe in.