when lost -

[Ipomoea]

IPOMOEA so lay me down in golden dandelions  Maybe later, after he falls asleep in a bed of wildflowers and weeds and tangled prairie grasses, he’ll think back on today and wonder about the red-eyed ghost he met in between the stars. Maybe then he’ll think there was something familiar about those eyes, or something unsettling about that first, pointed question. Maybe later he’ll feel it as it was perhaps meant to be felt: a knife, slipping smoothly between his ribs to his aching, falling-apart heart. But for now, he is watching only the stars, feeling each explosion and transformation echoing between his lungs. And even when he stops to think what a strange question, there is none of it in his eyes when he turns to regard the other stallion quietly. Red eyes. White coat. He does not smile — and somehow, somehow that feels significant to him. “And I am Ipomoea,” his voice is hushed, nearly lost beneath the sounds the stars make in their dying and rebirthing. And yet when they suddenly grow quiet (in between bursts), his voice seems to echo through all that blackness, all that silence, all that empty space like the ending note of a song. “But it would seem you already know that.” And he wonders that maybe he is that final dying chord, fading into the shadows. A pause — a heartbeat — a breath. “What good is a king, if he does not love his kingdom?” He does not say he thinks it will be the death of him, one day. Around them the stars are a burst of color and he, for perhaps the first time in his life, thinks he must look like so many shades of gray beside them. “Why—“ there are as many questions in him as there are stars surrounding them, pressing in against them, light against flesh, searing. There is starlight in his eyes and stardust on his teeth, and oh it starts to taste a bit like blood when he swallows. “—do you ask?” @lyr ”here am I!”

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