Tearstains from both had set,
like naked droplets from candles, thin and bare.
Their eyes that match those tables,
adorned without care. The flavors brought,
with appetite crude and fraught in a man
who takes a trembling woman’s hand,
He compares her scent, simple and sour
to the backyard gardens, without their flowers.
Barren, cold, and bleak to behold,
a woman told nothing of a love this old.
An oaken frame, drawn canvas, and brittle sketch
of aged skin etched of wrinkles stretched.
To love with what budded before it opened,
and sift among what Heaven could have drifted.
To sleep in her eyes that awaken every night,
wondering if God will come to bring her sight
upon answers, that when sunless
are splayed as legs, are spread
like terminal cancer.
She rose as one bud of little light,
with heartbeats that are repeating
like common slurs, like useless words
written on white of clouds,
drawn into images on her own canvas,
turning a closed heart into open turbulence.
Repetitions of sadness, years of madness
deep in a love that only did begin
on the surface of ancient skin.
Modern Romanticism 