Modern Romanticism

Who goes,
there? Who reenters?
Where? Are you there,
hearing me mourn,
noticing me wilt,
stuck on my thorns?

I am reusing
my familiar tragedy,
holding my head
in helpless hands.

I reach for eternity
to bring back the void,
tugging on dark threads,
as love’s famed sickness
plays dirges for the dead.

Burning. In these waters,
I am drowning upon sights,
letting winter disguise me
in harrowing white,

because I cannot conquer
what love has left me with.

Like exhumed flame
from some unseen heart,
we fell, reveling in
everything we took from the start
of those bridges.

To them, we raised them
as crippled children,
lost in their minds.
Lost, though refined
in where they danced,
eager to be lost
on some amusing path,

serenading their wickedness
on the path’s own twist.

You were brought here
to speak for what we lost.
We were made, here,
to love, too unkindly.
We cherished,
bending branches, with limbs
we cut to spill the sweetness,
having lived in each other’s
colorful madness,

reminding those same children
of their unfortunate state.

To bridges, we removed,
while upon our ecstasy
of rolling in embraces,
among debris,
we stayed to consume the ash
for another hour
which lingered on our tongues,
on our lips,

reminding ourselves
always, of what we cost
those eyes, mirroring our damage,
the wounds, our blindness.

A moment of bleeding
palms, onto sands,
hands into outstretched shores,

dropping salt into a wound,
carving into rivers
what were those unset letters,
going downstream
with the unheard cries
adding more to the flood
of words.

What rose?
From a horizon,
a line that broke, on a promise,
on a signature never written,
because that heart
that came close
bled, on an ocean
where yearning was everyone’s error,
everyone’s memorialized terror.

In wanting of a time
when sunrise was our time
to come up with the fog
that would never be
the confusion
that keeps us in sheets,
that keeps us in scores
where sorrow
would be the song to a future
colored in a fabled gray.

A fairytale,
pictured on a setting
where caresses are letting
emotions become
the ocean’s motion,

and nothing could surround us,
as the fog of our clouds,
where sadness comes to shroud
our uniting eyes, in its crowd.

Like leaking highways,
running freely
to those endings,
colliding against happiness,
within sceneries
that are deserting
love, at its goodbye,
at the released sigh.

Like what we could call
a space, for our bliss.
Like what we could name
a face, for a kiss,

we were once trapped,
wanting more
to the torture,
blowing out candles,
to get grounded,
in our roots,
burning in thrashing limbs,
wielding fire in our hands,
our ancient sin.

Like what we could forever ruin,
when messages are sent
through ashen debris,
a color for its sounds –
a lasting passage in its emptiness
when nothing ran down
from blindness, for ink.

Like what we could never reconnect
among wires, from opposing sides
where distance reminds
us, of where winter resides,

keeping us pale,
on hope’s endless scale.

Heaven’s voice
fills your lungs
with something other
than smoke,

with something
other than those tears,
as it must be
that you are healing
apart from the one,
the embittered one
who held your throat
in vaporous kisses.

We disappeared,
together, as we withered
like petals that divorce
their towers, their stems,
into becoming fevers,

as if we shouted at the sun
for a different kind of warmth.

We wanted to lean back
to embrace stars.
We wanted to see something new
flowing from open wounds,

but we were careless
to see what was beneath the moon,
being everything old,
all things cold.

You are gone,
knowing something more,
beyond the drift
we satiated our thirsts over,
leaving smiles in the dust,
leaving growth
covered in rust.

Pathway,
a doorway,
an outside beyond
your radiance,

to a shadow
that never forgets
what it once held
inside empty palms.

Blue in the face,
suffocating in the space
of what was left
puddling here,

among tears, of those
that will not leave
for upcoming years,

and among your fossil,
the one that disguises
history’s blank curtain,

for you are always one to
keep resurrecting.

White-out
your name, among
the temporary,
for I wish
for pain to escape faster,

needlessly going
for heartbeats that whimper.

I am astir,
always in your air,
exiting from the doorways
of your lungs.

Another hour
left, to be tugged,
on a rope, upon a slope,
yearning for the next year
when I will have
an ocean of sweeter tears.

Blossoms,
ones that keep burning
without much struggle,

while there is forfeiture,
in being stilled, here.

Being carried, over there,
being like seeds without direction
into that disheartened abyss.

There is healing
expressed, elsewhere.

There is finality
breathed, everywhere.

No one knows as much
as the one who held on
to the shadows,

distant, in a cloud’s leaving
a tearstained scenery
beneath, at these feet
where you lay,
bleeding in defeat.

But I did, as I did not
wish to keep you
at that agonizing distance,
though weather proved itself
the miserable weight.

You are reburied
in a shell, cast in stone,
heated from a dispassionate hell.

A numbness, carried on
from teardrops that drowned us
in currents that lost us.

Once, always in love,

now being here, turning eyes above
to see nothing but dark clouds,
with nothing but curtains
coming down.

Dig me in
from previous disassociation,
for you are the one drug
to keep me running
on a guess,

makeshift on an excuse,
blinded to another’s
fires of warning.

Undressed skin,
disrobed eyes;
the leaves you walk upon
are brittle,
only in disguise.

I can’t seem to fear you,
as our faces are smeared
in the white.

In the white,
where outlines are drawn,
we were touching
more than what I felt was forever,
rubbed against your naked shore.

In the bleak,
where dust falls from rust,
I find myself entering
the smoke, the fog where you sail,

though I can’t seem to fear you,
listening to your heartbeat,
even among the fading heat
where your body was,
where your trail
cannot be covered,
can always be recovered.

Come here.
Drown there,
relived in teeming agony.
We’ll fall, coming close
to death, once more,
being relit with a single candle
near an open sore.

Kisses for this connection,
an embrace upon that resurrection,
with love, like a tool
to fix what cannot be broken,
even if, even when
pieces of our reflection
are decorating our flesh,
on bleeding cuts.

Taking down stars,
raising wars,
believing in things that fade
on rivers where we wade,
searching through debris
that drenches our feet,

for something, only something
to keep us in the shade.

Tossing around, pushing through
tears and long-relived years,
escaping embraces, inside tunnels,
needlessly mourning the roads
we dared to defend,

and always, if not forever
denying what was meaning
to mend.

I am certain
that lakes will, one day
dry themselves upon hearts,
with no more sadness,
nothing else to rain
from those depleting years
we were taking the fall.

I am reassured
through oceans that were
walked upon,
that faces are keeping
their memories, not like fugitives
racing through thoughts,
upon unburied nights,

but like petals that have gentleness
to their float, to their steer
on the slowest of currents
against history’s pages,
against what we thought
was lifting us,
though was drowning us.

We glimmer
when fog has begun
to evaporate, to vanish
its blanketing aura
around us,

seeing scenery
once covered in snow.