To Be Away From You Is To Be Away From My Being Poem by Windsor Guadalupe Jr

To be away from you
Is to be away from my being.
My soul wanes from tethers
To distances - gaps and bridges.
To be away from you
Is to be away from my being;
The world bawls a guttural sneer
As its throats, its marshes are
Gorged with the quagmire of
Not having you here -
To be away from you
Is to shatter glass dreams
Upon lonely walls -
And yes, I pick them up
And exhaust myself in the coalescence:
I pick up a strand of your hair,
A shard of your tear,
A hair from the back of your neck even,
An eyelash far-flung in the wayward Sun

And with all of them
I try so willingly to form you
Your sophistication, your surfeit beauty
Across the gelid waters
Of craving for your voice,
Your hair, the flair of your resilient river,
The secrets of your pillars
And the blatancy of your stars.
In here I die or at least
Vie for another breath underneath
The lunatic's asylum as I am soused
In the greatest travail - the dreaded trouble
Of not having you here -
To not have you here is to shed
My skin underneath the rain
To not have you here is to see
Myself in each of the corners of the world:
Restive in unsettling dreams and
Unquiet slumbers.

To be away from you
Is to be away from my being
My soul only grows cold wrapped in
The ivies of solitude;
My soul stops its ebullient dance
Even the blood refuses to surge in a trance -
The vicissitude delights my
Faceless void.
And here, now
As I count the days for you to return
Only to leave again,
I will memorize your structures,
The sleeping salt on your skin, the slope
Of your nose and the contour of your hills -
I will sequester everything as
You steal all of me too, a mutual rendezvous.

And when you go astray
In the sleaze abyss
I will continue in singeing
Until the flames of yearning
Wallow and engulf me -
To be away from you
Is to be away from my
Hapless being