Modern Romanticism

While we were
living the emptiness
of each breath,
holding onto the signs
that kept us going
through the rain,
creating puddles
from dissolved reflections,

you were always an ocean
too far from where I was
standing here,
in the mist,
shapeless in the fog
of my spirit.

Nothing had been warm,
though everything had sound
much like thunder,
much like what weather
kept us together.

We shouted, we vocalized
our pain into storms
that never settled,
until it was the two hands
that lost their grip
on love’s survival.

We knelt in the ashes,
collecting in our palms
our small place,
among the ebony.

Whenever we walked,
it was with heaviness
to our swollen hearts.

Whenever we watered
our soiled gardens,
our eyes drowned them.