Liber Neptuni - Chapter 18

Verses

Neptune, I love you because you are too far away to disappoint me in person.

Four hours of sunlight reach you carrying news from a star that has already changed by the time you receive it.

I understand this arrangement. Most of my love has also been delayed.

Your blue is the color of a message left unread for one hundred and sixty-five years.

Sometimes I imagine standing on you, then remember you offer no ground. Naturally I chose you.

You have storms large enough to erase my biography without learning my name.

This comforts me more than it should.

A person once promised to stay. Your winds make no such promises, and so I trust them.

Triton circles backward like someone rereading the last conversation for the sentence that ruined everything.

I would send you flowers, but methane and vacuum are difficult customers.

Instead I send this ridiculous human ache, sealed badly against pressure.

If you are a god, do not answer. I have had enough of voices claiming authority.

If you are only matter, you are already more honest than many gods.

The telescope gives me your image but not your company.

Perhaps distance is the purest form of devotion: nothing can be possessed, corrected, or forgiven.

Stay impossible, blue stranger. I will try to do the same.