Faith & Spirit Quote by Bradley Chicho

Surrender arrives here less as a plea than as a command dressed up in tenderness. “Surrender the vert platonic bond” is an intentionally unstable phrase: “vert” (green, or upright, or a heraldic tincture) smuggles color and posture into something supposedly chaste. Calling it “platonic” tries to sanitize the attachment even as the syntax betrays desire. The bond is “tying your soul to mine,” not hand to hand or body to body, which lets the speaker claim purity while staking a totalizing claim: if it’s only spiritual, why does it require surrender?

Then the line swerves into “mine craft,” a rupture that reads like a deliberate mishearing. Split apart, it becomes ownership (“mine”) and fabrication (“craft”) in the same breath: the speaker is both possessive and artful, constructing the relationship as an aesthetic object. It also drags the lofty “soul” talk into something transactional, almost laborious. Love as artisanal extraction.

The closing image, “the sky fades a pink shadow cast,” is where the poem’s emotional weather gets honest. Pink is a sentimental color, but “shadow cast” makes it derivative, a tint produced by something offstage. The romance is twilight, not sunrise: beautiful because it’s ending, or because it depends on an obstruction.

Contextually, Chicho’s dates (1895–present) already feel like a poetic trick, suggesting an authorial persona that refuses biography in favor of atmosphere. The intent seems to be exactly this: to stage intimacy as a crafted illusion, and to let the language show its seams.