A lover in Ashes (For Layne)

burn,
because i love you.
rest those weary eyes
for they cannot see
the thousand candles
merging on the wet april pavement.

whether the sky expands,
or calls forth its guards,
retrieve your wings
for they're no longer denied.
sleep in peace,
my tired comrade;
ask no more
for you have done your part,
and sung your way to salvation.

i stand here, my delayed hero.
i listen while you hum;
i only know the tune, the words,
and the names,
but not the story
and the suffering.

fly onward,
transcend time,
and haunt the pages
of fame and history.
let your wake tell your story,
and i will happily bear
the scars you left,
my lyrical dead, my harmonized lines,
my lover at seventeen.

2009

they found your bones
on a temple of rusty daggers
and ruled out murder and suicide.
there were no candles, no blood,
no cuts to complete the ritual,
only traces of poison,
slight, run out.

the TV flickered on
to outlive the legend;
the key was swallowed
to escape detection.
and through the door,
they charged, discovered,
the indistinct face
of the fallen god.


you sang of solitude,
you shunned what you owned,
instead resorting to the vines,
a recluse in the dark,
reduced, unattended.


you recall being maimed
and forget being loved.
fourteen days un-suffered,
seven years sundered,
and all those blank spaces
in my collection
still await your surrender.

A Virgin's Frailty

Hope departs from the room. And for all she knows, from the world, leaving a monstrous absence in his stead. An open window from which her labored breaths escape into the night invites the faintest glow of moonlight. Beyond, where she believes laughter cannot reach, where music has long since been an unfamiliar refuge, her love tarries in what he believes is ultimate peace.

That morning produced the impossible and enlivened the unthinkable. She watched him go as he conscientiously dragged his feet unto the pavement. He never understood what it means to be loved by the unknown for she never gave him any reason to be led to think so. Nearly half her life, she submitted to him; all that was left of her that didn't hanker for him was a tiny square inch that god knows is sanity.

Inside his confinement, he withdraws all his secrets for living. He forgot what it was like to be out in the open the moment he set foot on those cold marble stones that would soon transmute some of its coldness into him until he turned into something as icy. He looks through the windows with only a fleeting interest, as though the whole world doesn't have anything to do with him anymore or with the people who live in it.

And because she couldn't, for a fee, buy his feelings, she forced herself to feel what few women would: She accepted the unrequited nature of her love. She made it easy simply by getting used to its pain, a pain that would otherwise destroy those who are weak of heart. She had then stopped living without any hint of dying. No one knows how she does it, no one knows for sure what it is that preserves her. And few ever understood that she lost him along with her mind. She would go on loving him; she would withstand many a test of time; and the love would go on enlarging itself to consume her at last.

She loves him just by thinking of him. She knows this much is true.

END