He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear

His yawn a tunnel through time

A window too

Took respite in a cave to ease his arthritic thumb

For many moons and one sun

For most of the Neolithic age

The immoral wakes

Remembers centuries as minutes but what is time?

Memory is a river that churns ocean to ocean and cascades into the bluest of space

Thinks, as one thumb circles another for maybe a week

Ponders, without a clash of eyelids for no one knows how long

Imagining a tunnel through a cave wall 

He might dig sooner or later

It matters less as he turns and sleeps some more

The immortal wakes

You can forget love, he told a beast that lay beside him injured from a great fall, perhaps from a higher cliff, perhaps from the sky

The immortal slept through the crash, the thud 

The dust cloud had settled by the time his eyelids like a cape on a bat opened wide and took in light

The beast could do very little but listen

The immortal wakes

He told the beast he had loved harder than the fall he’d taken days maybe weeks earlier

The beast groaned (so perhaps it was weeks)

He loved hard and deep like the tunnel he might dig

many moons ago

He didn’t lie with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed to just a mumble in his big ear

They walked across mountains and planes, her asleep on his back, in his pouch, on the crown of his head

Her mortal rhythm taps on his skin

Skin maligned with the scars of eternity 

Scars you’d expect, basins of old sweat, slowly drying up as he sleeps

They leapt like leopards until they flew like birds, he felt love was like that

leaps monumental and over and over until you feel like you are a bird

Across oceans they swam one hand digging through the weighted water striding onwards

the other keeping her mortal heart tapping against the palm of his hand held just above the water

He lay with her until her mortal heart slowed, slowed, slowed, slowed to just silence in his big ear 

then the wind from the oceans, the very same oceans they once swam together, whipping across the earth

lifted the dust, the very same dust that surely settled upon his cape-like eyelids as they lay closed when the beast fell from a great height

became powdery blow on a brittle cave wall

he sent the wind back to the oceans with a scream that gave no one any rest least of him

until

upon a sleep he embarked to hold his memory of her in a thousand winter’s dreaming

The immortal wakes

he barely recalled the feeling of grief and why she was important

the beast smiled and asked, so you can forget pain but not love? The story of love is eternal not the feeling, the immortal said looking at the beast’s one lazy eye holding up

so joy or pain or even indifference is just evidence of love but the story remains eternal?

yes, the story of love remains eternal

the beast began to shake with laughter and wished that he could move closer to the immortal and breathe in his wisdom but he was broken or just heavy with despair, after his great fall

I shan’t ask how long you’ve been here then said the beast

oh that question is my favourite question

so?

forever and a day

probably he thought and smiled at the beast but for me it’s more about what I shall I do next and can I be bothered?

I know hurry as a concept but not as a compulsion

perhaps the last beast that fell from a great height told me

perhaps he didn’t fall and perhaps he wasn’t a beast but he did tell me about being in a hurry or she did, perhaps it was a she or a child, yet to to be either in presentation

anyway hurrying is not for me

the beast sighed loudly, the dust billowed and hung in the air a long long time

the immortal wakes

and realised that the beast was at the end of a love story, a great love story