Voltage III

Do not come near me carelessly

I have become fluent in the exquisite discipline of restraint

There was a time

When every bright impulse might have escaped me at once

Without reverence for consequence

I no longer belong to that kind of ruin

Now I know the holy intelligence of what is withheld

The grandeur of a silence so charged it can alter the temperature of a room

You stand there

And the air rearranges itself

Not because of touch

That would be too simple

Something passes between us

Subtle as a filament beneath glass

Invisible until it burns

Refined enough to make stillness feel like an event

I do not reach

I let the distance glow

I let it become unbearable with elegance

Because desire, when it has matured beyond appetite, does not beg for completion

It acquires gravity, and everything in its field begins, quietly, to lean

So if I cross toward you

It will not be from weakness

Nor from hunger without thought

It will be because

I have measured the cost of contact

And found it beautiful

And when I touch you

It will not feel like beginning

It will feel like recognition at its most dangerous

As though something ancient in the blood had been waiting

For precisely this permission

The End