Transcendent

A short poem about erotic and emotional surrender

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A sensual portrayal of passionate, consuming love—the kind that is both transformative and potentially risky.

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transcendent

I am madly, desperately reaching—
not away, but toward:
toward your hands destroying me,
toward the kind of love that leaves marks,
that tears me open like sweetness
spilling its core to the sun,
toward your hands remaking me
toward the weight of you—
that grammar of skin,
enraptured and glistening,
with the syntax of surrender,
toward coming undone
light returning to its source.

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Author’s Note

I am madly, desperately reaching toward this poem’s own meaning, and I want to tell you what I meant when I wrote it.

I needed the direction to matter. Reaching toward instead of away from--that was everything. Because I wasn’t writing about fleeing love or resisting it. I was writing about surrendering as a choice, as an active movement into vulnerability. I wanted this poem to move into the consuming, not away from it.

I needed that phrase, “toward your hands destroying me,” because love at its most intense does unmake you. But I wasn’t interested in writing about violence. I was thinking about necessity. How a forest fire must consume the forest to release its new growth. So the destruction becomes natural, almost inevitable. It becomes like fruit ripening in the sun. Sweetness spilling its core. That’s not violence. It’s just what happens when something opens up completely.

I knew I had to bring language itself into the poem because I was trying to describe something that words usually fail at. So I called the body a grammar, the touch a syntax. A language that could read and be read because skin does speak. It has structure and rules and meaning. And within that grammar is not loss but surrender, a deliberate yielding. I wanted precision there, even in the dissolution.

That ending, though, “coming undone and light returning to its source,” I needed that to feel like completion, not fragmentation. Like in the same way that dissolving isn’t the same as disappearing. Like, returning is always possible. Like when we become whole by becoming less separate.

I wrote this poem because I wanted to capture what it feels like to choose to be unmade.

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