Modern Romanticism

You were saving
your name for another's list,
your smile for someone else's
bruised, smothered lips.
What love, in our heartache
to burst to be beneath
our trampling feet?

I began to love,
while you began to drain
all that ink upon the white
from your eyes,
coated in lies.

You were selling your heart
to another, a mere thief
who would never return it.

In pain, counting grains
upon this beach of looseleaf
where all that's been traced
is our names, but one
has begun to burn,
has begun to turn
far from the sun.

Alone, in the dark
of ink from a phantom's heart.
I have nothing to write
when I have nothing to fill.
I have nothing to revise
to revisit the sunrise.