The Obsession Oracle
Written: May 2nd, 2026, for a contest sponsored by Seth Pina
Based on the Poem: The Artist
5th place contest winner
******************
It begins as a breath, barely born—
a lucent little longing that should have stayed liminal,
Yet it irrupts, unabated,
threading itself through the chiaroscuro of my thoughts.
I tell myself it is otiose,
a passing flicker, a quixotic quirk of the mind—
but it grows tensile, treacle-thick,
a rumbustious rhapsody refusing to evanesce.
Your name—your very sobriquet—
becomes a mellifluous mantra,
an epizeuxis echoing in the marrow,
a chant I never meant to memorize.
I wander through hours like a wayward opsimath,
learning too late how fixation forms its own theology—
how a single presence can become
a sacrosanct symbiosis of ache and awe.
Every thought is festooned with your outline,
every silence redolent with your imagined breath;
even the air feels janiform,
half mine, half yours,
as if the world itself has chosen sides.
I try to exculpate myself
from this inchoate imbroglio,
but obsession is a sagacious sherpa—
It knows the steepest path
and drags me up it anyway.
And still—
beneath the nadir of night,
in the hush where hubris dissolves—
I feel the truth unfurl:
That obsession is not hunger,
nor hubris,
nor hecatomb of reason—
but the amaranthine ache
of wanting to witness beauty
so completely
that it finally
witnesses you back.
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