Theater of Sorrows

This bitter moment burns
A harsh rising bile, a vicious internal clawing…
To taste love; The sweetest saturation
Carving blue down my heart as it reveals itself to be a ghost
Mourning carried on the brittle air
Through bereft valleys of forgotten bones
A haunting reverie crushing time with its spindly fingers
Searing flesh with its spitting love, sheared of its legitimacy –
Tossed into a fire bath –
Charred into dust
To scatter across miles, spinning into a deluge of cement tears
That eventually rust on the tongues of the damned
In their moment of reckoning –
When their toothless, barbed-wire, open moth-filled mouths
Shriek foul throaty epitaphs, coffin memoirs ripe with bitter juices
Eyes sewn shut in exile, sulking serpent witch pouts
And you will remember; I will as well
But we are prophets of poverty; There will be no further stories
Of those miles in the rear view, 2am contemplations
Wide eyes, love letters, coffee kisses, tattoos
Bed sheets tangled, along with long hair
Darkness entwined with snow everywhere
Madness and cages, cigarettes and rages
Sorrow and shadow spilling onto written pages
While the crisp winter air burned our lungs and our hopes
Until we came unbound in a room full of ropes
Until all that we had were glances and silence –
Slicing through our hearts leaving more blood than violence
To spill from that wine glass you carefully sipped
While my mind was reminded of the taste of your lips
And how they used to travel all over my skin
And melt all my efforts at distance again
So that clothes fell away as you stayed your course
And again reminded me that I was yours
Since long before times brittle shattered illusions
Before poetic rhyme etched on firefly wings
Before there was conscious and unconscious flame
Before there was anything; You spoke my name –
Through threaded seasons of lilac-webbed epochs
You came for me, to protect what was yours
Your wild lions mane and nocturnal warrior eyes –
Potent medicine in the glow of the goassamer mist
Thick and sweet, like dark cherry wine
Your lips an irresistible chloroform kiss
Ah, but somehow we wavered and ice and the cold
Came out of the shadows this winter… took hold
To creep and dismantle, then splinter and burn
As we crashed into each other to damage and churn
In delusions of passion, we stabbed with dull knives –
Tried to glue all our wounds but just bled in reverse
While the wine grew moldy and acrid like stained smoke –
Filling our mouths with ripples of the perverse
Breeding slime beneath our skin that was horrid
We reached for each other but the drowning was torrid
To ravage our hearts… To tarnish our souls…
Once the writhing was done we had nowhere to go
And so this bitter moment
Loves eyeless ghost
A mordicant, corrosive valentine picking at loves withered bones
Blood red white wine to choke down as it turns to ashes
In our room where the bedposts are tied with worn sashes
To eventually rust, to eventually fade –
To eventually, poetically disintegrate
Until not the smallest trace, even if sublime
Is left of two people who loved before time
Just a diseased cemetery dripping with sour
Where angels sutured to demons are being devoured
And fanciful inscriptions written in blood –
There’s no fate, no forever, no magical cure
No “I’m sorry,” or “Please stay,” as it ends in a blur

Just the sorrowful truth –

Love doesn’t always endure

Backward glances to try and hold time
Traces of love in torn poetic pages
Coffee-stained teardrops romancing our words
What’s done is done, tender scars remain ageless
Anguish and regret spilled out in silence
Slicing through our hearts leaving more blood than violence
Wounds bled in the deception of silence
Slicing through our hearts leaving
More. Blood. Than. Violence.
Love lost in the depths of silence…
Slicing through our hearts
Leaving

More blood than violence