Cielo

As a lion to prey you followed me,
Your smile as if it were trying
Not to grin,

Not to wear your patience thin
Or excite itself towards a conclusion.

It must have scared you straight to love,
Knowing what it could mean to be so full and blissful,
So quiet you could stop inside for a moment.

You’d spent your whole life
Moving place to place,

Dashing islands and futures,
Adjusting yourself each time

To live a hundred lives an hour,
Each hurting the way a promise hurts a future.

They were simply never there,
Never trying to be there,

Existing in some parallel of the mind
That you always fought against,

Slashing some enemy that might
Have been your own eyes,
The shakes of the brain in remembrance.

The aftershock of names
And lies they fed you like clothing.

The cuffs fit you loose and wild,
A sky child,

Thunder and rain
But a sun so bright I simply shiver.

The night falls and I think of you,
Missing the blue hues of your clarities

That feed my pens.
Their dull fatigues
Lobbing against me

To write something that just might work,
Might bring you home to me.

There’s the first month
And then there’s three.

It was always in you to fight,
The way you had been fighting love.

Fighting the idea of being loved,
And then fighting to love another
As if in two trenches at once.

So it must fare quite clear
With an arm to the chest

And the safety releasing itself
To those loud fires that would drive me wild.

It is in those opposites we live,
Speaking from the place I write,

The place I merely stumbled into you,
A bubbling fool drunk for a muse.

And there it become a battle,
Another trophy for you to lift.

A life you could live to completion

By Zizheng William Liu

Biography:

Zizheng William Liu (he/him/his) is a student from Houston, Texas who loves to write fiction and poetry. When he’s not writing, he also enjoys snapping the ever-changing world around him with his Canon Rebel camera.