Penelope, Always

Ripping apart the veils of Time, I return eternally to you, my Penelope,

Reeking of remembrance of things to come;

With these hands dipped in kindred blood, 

That are also hands wielded to deliver calm.

And everywhere I have gone, I've seen:

There is no Death without its light,

And no Life without its own darkness:

Both threatening to engulf Creation: as in our world, 

So in every other. I have seen our

Billion selves in a billion separate worlds :

None without its sweetness and light,

All fraught with danger and malodorous fear - 

And yet boundless virtue have I known,

Paired with unspeakable evil, mirrored to 

Infinity, like specters, 'twixt two planes:

The irrevocable past and the inescapable future.

Rising from our moonlit bed, I have seen, time and again, our

Lives and our deaths twisted in strands of light and shadow

Forever, into a single crimson thread, 

That through the wandering maze in my head,

To this moment here and now, has led 

Me: where the past glides through the endless knot of the future.

In a billion lives have I loved you, and in

Equal measure of desolation mourned your loss -

For nothing changes; as everything is, 

And always was, just as you

My Penelope, still weave, unweave and weave again, 

Our timeless shroud of bitter rue.