I grind the words unspoken
Between blood stained teeth
And spit apologies into empty glasses.
On my bedside table
I stack a pile of ashes,
All that’s left of promises unkept
And unfulfilled dreams.
Your touch was like the Philharmonic,
Now a distant memory in time
As fleeting as your scented flame.
I burn myself on fading embers
And trace my eyes in obsidian dust
Leaving prints from fingertips
That you will never find again.
I live in suppositions
Illusions as deep as the pupils seem to go
And thin as the line between your lips
Internal waves rage within my ears
And lodge themselves
Between logic and reason
Corroding and reeking of regret.
I hesitate at your laughter
Your silence
Your hesitation and your grace.
I decompose the composition
That is your emotional landscape
And commit to reflect in minute strokes
The appropriate response.
Yet the lines and colors rapidly fade
And I am left with unfinished understanding
Always.
You left your lights on
And as the battery drained
Your life took an altered course
That would never be the same.
You left your lights on
And in the chilled illumination
Moths fluttered freely about
Crashing against plastic prisons.
You left your lights on
And as they dimmed
You began to realize your mistake
You left your lights on
And as they died
It was much too late.
Her touch was but a memory of skin and warmth
Gingerly engraved within my heart
Like so many before, yet like no other
I can not explain the need,
The urgency that attends
The prickling of my skin at her voice
Which I have too long since heard.
She is the hope of all I wish I could be
And so much of what I (what we) could do in this world
To heal, to soothe, and to mend
To bind the broken hearts
With the words that robbed me of my own.
Traffic lights stretch into bars
On paved road in the middle
And at the end of rain
Figuratively and literally trapping travelers,
Penitentiaries of yellow and red.
My head is a house of mirrors
Distorting words unspoken,
Bending intentions
Around a suffocating heart.
She is the wind
The quiet that kills,
The silence that sows fear
In fields where flowers once grew.
She is the earth
The grit and shale,
That marks the pathway
For feet stumbling, blind.
She is the sky,
The radiance of noon
With clouds freckled across
Marking the beauty in shade.
She is the moon,
Her calm laughter
Trickling in the form of light
Tucks the children into sleep.
While wilting in crimson melancholy
Weeping petals as morning rain
Or tears that pool in midnight mourning
Turn over a new leaf
With the gentle nudge of spring,
Stretch out of winter’s shade.
It is such relief
To hear your thoughts
Mirrored in a stranger’s voice
Or laid out in pen.
Creeping contradictions contort
Themselves while constructing kosher
Sentimentality, placating inner turmoil
With unstable promises of change.
Moonlit Poetry 