Rampant & Golden

The word nothing
takes on
different shades of meaning.
Nothing
with you
is leagues away
from nothing
without you.

Nothing without you
translates to
a long stretch of road to walk
in the stifling heat
with nowhere to rest my feet
reams of numbers, codes, words,
codes in words, words in code
with the intoxicating urgency
of the present
but having no bearing to
the world’s ultimate destiny
and the numbers all add up
to nothing.
It’s like a table heaped
with papers,
obligations,
baggage
haphazard
everything in plain sight
but you can’t find anything
nothing
belongs anywhere
and nothing
is where it belongs.

Nothing with you
is nothing short of
waking up to a busy calendar day
suddenly cleared up with one fell sweep of a pen
by a Signal Number Three typhoon
like the world’s just been held at bay
a little longer.

Nothing with you
is the two of us being busy
separately
in a single room
working in silence
you, earplugged with music and lyrics
me, slashing through the keyboards with metaphors
too preoccupied to speak
but knowing full well one needs only to look up
to cross the void,
to not be alone,
to have it all.

Tonight
I am a clear bowl
crammed to the brim
and tight-packed to the walls
with complicated,
space-consuming,
time-demanding,
nothing
and all it needs is you
to give me the potential
to turn it into anything
I want it to be.