Angel food cake and plain strawberries on top —
This is the only dessert I ever wanted for my birthday.
Spare me the decadent chocolate and layers of elaborate frosting.
Nothing was lost to me by forgoing so much sugar-coated filling
in flavored sweetness. Even as a child, I wanted only for

simplicity: white and spongy for innocence and the remembrance
of a time dipped in juicy red reality, sweet with the slightest

aftertaste and that strawberry river laden with tiny seeds

swallowed whole, sure to awaken some meaning
to the length of my lifelong quest to know 

who I was in this time, to consecrtate
the journey on from here.

You have always been different, choosing one cake

or the other, but always something layered. Is it true ?
In the dream, we were both given our choice of cake and ate it, too.
As I stood beside heaven’s host and watched you take a bite of your life,
a tear fell, for I saw thtat you did not see and understood at once
the stacked illusionary beliefs you have deemed delicious.

The host wiped it from my eye and without a word
revealed what meaning I had sought for my own life,
gently showing me again the bread of my life unbroken,

formed by my true desire to be gifted by a rising, 

to leave seeds here in this time, some trail
of texured truth to lead me home again.

Whipped waves of white were as all the seas
that carried me through time. Without red stain river of
learning that had left its mark on me and changed me
by awakening within me the memory of my innocence,
purity I long thought robbed from me, it is beautiful but bland.
The strawberries, of course, always remind me of you, and,
in the dream, the host turned me again, silently, toward you.
Only this time he did not wipe the tear but let truth come clear
as it rounded the curve of my cheek and fell as we had once.
And from afar, through my tears, I saw it as a whole:
Layers upon layers of love forming and informing

your life, so beautiful, and my life, so beautiful.

There before me, you were smiling, most satisfied
with fine layers of creamy goodness, delicious delicacies
of the only life you had wanted: one filled with every good

gift granted when you stood for all you thought most true .
I saw again that you did not see but suddenly realized the pure
perfection of it all. I had always seen them individually —
those layers of one lie or another, to me a distortion
of Love’s one essential truth. They were tasty treats 

conccocted in a confectionary, false prophets of freedom 

dressed in finery and you their fool for believing them.
But now I saw it was necessary and need not
be taken from you.

Your cake, comprised of what I judged false beliefs:
one part rich, familiar, yellow cake for home and family
you saw yourself as protector of, and then so many layers
of separation: there, the one for me and your judgment 

of all the ways love is wrong and is meant to be kept
in its place, so unlike my messy life, bright white

doused in a river of red. You tasted the layer

leavened with heaven’s seal upon your soul,
the duty you take seriously and the life you have
denied yourself, having remembered enough of
patterned denials from the past, paying penance still.
Still, I saw it plainly now: how all the layers
were leading you back to the whole of you.

It was with you as it was with me,
and all was well. Nothing was in need
of anything and all of it divine — no one cake

better than any other but rather a delicious example
of variety, catered choices served up for the enrichment
of our souls, whatever cake we chose. On Earth,
as it was in Heaven, life was in every moment,
bitter or sweet, plain or dipped in flavored icing,
seeded or smooth, spilled out messily or neat layers
divided evenly and eaten with silver finery —
in the center of every blessed life layer upon layer
of love, each birthday a new remembering.