It was her words that held
on to me through the night,
in delicate whispers falling
sporadically like raindrops
to cleanse my beating heart
in reassurances of affection;
I feared the coming storms,
darkening the sky in littered
debris and crashing through
the shadows in far too close
lightning strikes, as I wept –
holding on to every whisper
of her delicate voice trailing
through the black and murky,
waiting for the moon to shine.
We were only as good
as the lies on which we
would break, subtle yet
piercing as truth would
surround itself in cloaks
and daggers, shielding
away the innocence and
hiding from the strands
of pain and discomfort
that break with the day;
we were only as good
as we could pretend to
be, losing ourselves in
the reality that our lies
had become the truths
that we would never see.
We were left to wander
the streets with the signs
of dusk looming, set in
motion beneath a subtle
hue of jazz found in the
stars, with you and I as
the trumpet and the sax,
trailing songs with our
footsteps, singing along;
we were born wanderers,
left to the rhythms set by
the land, following along
with the moon and stars
guiding us hand in hand
to the places only seen by
the inside of our dreams.
I once knew how ink
bled from my loosely
strangled ideas into
scraps of feelings left
behind, burned across
the page, where desire
whispered against the
frailty of my own truths;
I had known the depths
of roots, as they were
bound like shackles to
the ground, where my
limitations had become
the soil in which I grew.
On the Phoenix we rose,
flying higher than the jazz
notes in June, with a steady
pour of those whiskey sours
at the ready, you and I were
back to the golden ages of
love after midnight, found
in the playful rhythms of a
trumpet and her sax; where
time for love had become a
luxury, yet the jazz kept on
swaying, and the drinks had
kept on pouring, falling into
repetitions of my heartbeat
singing against your chest –
we were flying higher than
the Phoenix, and we flew on.
I crave the pain that seeps
from my blood into poetic
trails of blue ink found on
the page, where light and
verse are clouded behind
lines of memories and the
subtle hues of white space
are begging to be branded
with the leftover outcries of
my mind and heart; I crave
the light of pain, when I can
shred through the darkness
in poetic upheaval, emerging
victorious, with pen in hand.
Storylines in Verse 