The exchange

 

The exchange happened at the end of a world
Without a word, without a gesture.

A clear night was thus born
The city purred at its feet.

His heart was no longer the matter
He gave her the most beautiful thing he’d ever made.

She hurriedly wrapped herself in the rainbow cloth
She was no longer cold.

Her own heart filled with pulsing joy
She listened to the lightwaves of love
She slept, and slept, and slept.

When she woke up, lightyears later,
She unfurled wingsongs covering the night:
He knew the world would never be the same again

He knew he’d bleed, every day, and not quite heal each time
Waking up to the city drowning in a sleepless coldfire
He’d hear ghosts calling out his fading name
Unrecognising it, slowly, slowly too thin to be heard.

The clothsheen faded, quasarcoloured the night instead
He knew chaos had begun long before the exchange happened
Entropy fractalled into his very frame, from the onset of worlds.

Never once questioning the concatenation of souls
He stepped in the darkflow with his eyes wide open.

The citylights faded into the quietest, dreamless sleep
And the night was of the deepest, most vibrant dark
That it might have been the bottom of the ocean
That it might have been the deepest recess of space.

The exchange was finally complete
Holding his moonheart in the palm of his hands.