Romanticism Poetry – Theater of Sorrows

Bones

Spoiler. I like readers of my work to choose their own meaning. But from time to time, I share my own meaning of a work. This poem is about… having someone love you in such a way, that he/she truly sees you. They see your wounds, your desires, road blocks, madness, and so on, and they silently, instinctively tend to you. They witness and honor all of who you are, in a loving way, until your distractions, your ghosts, your pain are finally quiet, and your fire, your authentic self, your joy come home – you return to yourself.

In the rabbit hole
Your deft, ferocious fingers contort my mangled spirit
Slicing with appendages, sinuous and toothy; Trimming
Slivers falling away
Gluttonous lunacy deposing
You paste onto my eggshell bones
Your menagerie of lovely brooding
Tender strokes in corners and crevices
Where pasting is futile –
Needle and thread are married with bone
As I lounge in your sultry, libidinous cocoon
My demons loan their wailing to stillness
When your eyes become a bridge reckoning passage through my smoky, sooty debris
The wet earth rubs my skin, coats my scars with clay motifs of warriors that move –
Each time my ashen flesh furrows
You lift my bones to wrap my spirit beneath
Pluck at a corner snagged on a splintered fracture –
Then line it up against nettled ribs
Your breath lilac sweet against my face
You bend your head, pasting and suturing –
Dabbing at blood, woe and darkness lovingly
A silent seer of the obscure
Your innate knowing –
Epochs in the making, formed from the cohesion of brutal and divine…
A chosen one, witness, ancient synergy of all and none
Your ministrations to my desolation like a warm, numbing prayer and I
Weary, heavy in my bones
Gaze at you with loving, revering eyes –
As the last stitch is gathered, the last remnant pasted and your beautiful lips lure me
You are the need in my want –
Your petting warming my cursed, barren spirit
Your blood washing away the foul damages of my dusty bones
Your eyes flashing, provoking spark to fire –
Incinerating my achromatic existence
Your breath against my skin an homage to dismembered desire
In the rabbit hole
You tend to my savage needs
Scour my ravages
Assuage the rampage –
Before my wretched spirit canonizes this devastation
I feel my wild (long ago dissected crudely)
Climbing through my bones
Spirit and bones in a lovely mess of carnal wonder…
And my demons digress
In awe, I am finally quiet
The bleeding cools
And my bones kiss the sun…

At Every Turn

I thought that you were hard to love
Like sewing a butterflies wings
Like exorcising ghosts by bringing back the dead
There’s honesty, and then there’s being cruel
I never meant to is the worst kind of deceit
Love melting into scars
Emptiness strangling the stars…
I thought your eyes were brown, when the road fell away behind us –
That dried up town in the rear view, where we tossed dirt onto the demons
But all I see is grey, casting shadows on your shadows
Rusted memories twisted round you
Pelting undertow threatening to drown you
I thought that I could take away your pain –
But I guess I don’t know how to
And killing time won’t devastate what’s devastated you
Demons’ bones in piles, but specters still gloating, spinning pompous smiles…
Grind the perverse gristle into broth –
Swallow down what’s edible, and leave the rest to rot…
Messenger eyes upon you, beak thrusted toward a hazardous moon
Naming you their kind –
Just like I sensed, the first time…
Feathers left in cobbled nests
Of thread and twigs, and torn, half written words of love in purple passages…
I’ll sew your wings, stitch them deep and strong, through your skin into your bones
So you can soar through sunflower galaxies, then I’ll whisper you back home
Let my body be your soft earth, where you can kneel down to pray
My eyes like liquid runes, spelling out you’re not alone
Those infestations gestating chaos in your abstract mind –
Come, give all that to me
I’ll paint it into words only for your ears –
Ten thousand juicy valentines…
We’ve had trouble staying on the road
Broken glass and crunched, metal-punctured dreams
Grapes dead on the vines –
We’ve dragged our scraped up hearts behind
But oh… the way you taste…
Like licking honey from the comb
I want to inhale all your words, all your sweetness, all your wounds
And oh… the way you hurt…
It sucks the marrow from my bones
Until I ache and bleed for you…
I gave up trying to understand what fate made clear so long ago
I thought that you were hard to love
But maybe it was me?
It’s 3am and the snow just keeps falling… falling… falling…
The cities lights make me feel melancholy, just like you often do
I think that sadness fills me with an absinthe bliss, like being stoned on poppy stew
And I’m sorry for the harsh words, and I’m sorry that I’ve been unkind
And I’m waiting, and at every turn –
You’re on my mind

Precious Things

Were it not for your departure –
Your subtle, sweet scent which lingers on the voile curtains
Wraps around me like a silky husk…
Like a last, sorry goodbye from the arms of a lover that knows he must abandon all hope –
Crushing loves’ timepiece beneath the heel of his well-worn boot, scattering its ghosts in all directions
Were it not for these precious things –
Hours of dreams, and dreaming
Countless flutters of the heart, murmurs of desires, joyful transcendences
Stitched together on butterfly wings, to take flight with the swiftest ascent
Melded into the armored breastplates of dragonflies, to withstand the frost, and darkness
And the barren temperament that life offers in the palms of its withered, calloused hands…
Then, I would inhale the last of your scent into my wilting lungs
Hold it there until it spun itself into lacy threads that built sticky, scattered webs –
Tethering you to me
And oh how I would give up the ghost without so much as one tender tear
Never to breathe another casual, happy breath again
If it meant that I could follow you into the unknown infinities of beyond
If only one last time, my weary fingers could soothe the burdens from your brow
Plumb the braided knots from your ravaged spine
Touch that mouth, of which I pressed my lips against to share my secrets and fragrant yearnings…
Would that I had the providence in this gypsy heart, to alert me to the depths of sprawling pain
That this love would incur
But no… I would not have taken to the sky, wings carrying me to the moons hidden crevices
So that I could deny love, cage it within rusted, lonely bars…
Must I steal from love all of its rapt glory, due to scars, and tears, and throttled rose bushes? –
Petals in forensic freefall, until thudding against the cold, hard ground…
We were chaos in a sugar bowl
And you, with your goblet eyes full of ruin –
A cimmerian, bleak valentine that spoke to me with words of dark longing
You were simmering shadow obscuring sunlight
Misery seeping, fluid and pulsing, like these inky words running off of the page, smearing my fingertips
And I; I was lovingly lost in your decadent dreariness
Tearing at my hair, clawing; Scraping winter wounds –
Decorating my eyes with dead prayers, betrayed ghosts
And brittle feathers, from the carcasses of crows in the corner boneyard, outside the south window
Your promises weren’t mine
We fell from different disappointments before we found our footing
Oddments burrowing beneath our skin, until our eyes lost their shine
And we forgot to find what we never knew
But, it doesn’t matter
I loved you anyway, and love you even still
Your voice carrying in the swaying feathered stalks that caress the brick walls
“Hush,” I tell myself
Those soft whispers are meant to be mine when I am still
The drumming of my heart turning toward the night sky where you are waiting

These precious things that you have left with me
Keep me grounded and alive though I would gladly depart if you somehow sent word –
Through old, musty pages, drum, visions or bird…
I would attempt to take flight, give up the ghost
But all I have left, in the most primitive form, is to hold the curtains to my nose, and see the buds next to the thorns
I feel your warmth against my spine
And I think that this won’t be our last goodbye
I think that it will wind
Through each season, each numinous, luminous, painterly occasion