What can be real after this?

What can be real after this?
It is the journey, long and transcendent
Life, the weary, reluctant return.
We return with so much more
But arrive, somehow, with less.
This closeness will never be far
But this distance leaves me bereft.
Would that I were never without you
But that life would also leave us alone.
I am already alone with these feelings;
Why not make this solitude absolute?

But I will not allow these fires to consume me
For beyond the fire is not rebirth
Just soot
Just despair.

We are not a forest
Nor a tree
We are not the desert plains
Not the battleground
We are simply arms and a face
A mind that thinks, a heart that beats.
And yet I feel apart of me
And I feel a part of me that reaches
Beyond these arms and this face
Beyond this mind and this heart.
I feel it as a force
I feel it as I wish I felt you now.
And it tells me that there is a closeness beyond that arms can express
An intimacy lips can barely tell.

What can be real after this?

1/2/2016