There Is No Hurry, We Shall Get There Someday.

Inspiration
May 16, 2012 at 22:58.

I felt depleted of inspiration and desire for the longest years. It was as if memories faded and earth faded, like constellations fell through the marine layer and the foam subsided in my cappuccino. That is what I was prone to think about during those long years, when the mist would cloud my eyes and my heart would stumble to beat.

Until I met you. And ever since, the stars have never shone so bright.

Love, and Other Dark Things
May 5, 2012 at 9:31 (Cinco de mayo!)

I’ve been thinking a lot about love, dear, and how the darkness it creates inside of you parallels the brightness that you emit, just like the light that reflects and refracts off of certain metals or certain pairs of sunglasses, and that darkness that envelopes your insides begins to feel more like a friend than a painful memory of what you’ve missed and what you’ve done wrong and how I’ve wronged you, and it almost becomes a comfort in your life, much like a dog on the window poking his nose into your lap, and you commence to make room for it much like you would a new passenger entering a crowded subway, and when it finally takes you over and forces you head-first into love—well, I guess you’ll have no reason to complain.

Goodbye
April 12, 2012 at 21:09. 

By this time you’re halfway to the stars but it doesn’t matter much to me, because your eyes are brighter than any constellation that I can see through the naked eye lest through a telescope, and I can see you from my front porch when I go outside to stargaze or check the mail or walk the dog and I’ll remember you and I’ll remember our goodbye, when all that was punctuated was “goodbye, darling,” and you left, but looking back I realized that there is nothing “good” about our “bye,” for my only memory of you is of you turning around and walking away, and the only image I have of you now is of you floating towards the stars as a bundle of light that barely contains your perfection.

Prologue
April 10, 2012 at 0:43.

Every story in life begins with the end. This inherent paradox rules our lives, it controls us and bears down on us so deeply that we oftentimes feel like we’re treading water in an ocean, and the only thing filling our lungs is the cold whisper of time, causing us to put our heads underneath the waves one last time. One last time, it tells us. 

Those were the last words I presume she heard. Or if she heard others, they were sent straight from her ear canals to her subconscious, where they lay awaiting their ultimate fate. Madeleine, she was a beautiful woman, even through childbirth. I told her that. Even in that blue hospital gown, the material rough against her ethereal skin, she was most gorgeous. And she always was, with her carnival and august eyes that fed me sweet-nothings when she blinked and sank my heart when she cried. And her constellation smile. You couldn’t be more awestruck than after watching her smile, the way that she would look down momentarily before staring deep into your soul and turn the corners upward––slowly, painfully slowly––but gracefully, until her lips widened to show just a bit of her teeth. It happened far too many times for me to continue to lose my words when I watched it happen, but it was too mesmerizing. My thoughts would seemingly wander out of my mind, caught in the small space between her lips. That was where I always wanted to be.

I remember the birth very well. It was the last day I saw her alive, so every moment is so clear. Like crystal. Like a mirror. It pains me to write now, after so much remembrance. I thought it would be facile to spill my words onto paper, to watch them roll off the tongue and through my pen, incanted onto this dull stationary; however, it is the complete opposite. They were treasured and repressed, and they can never leave. But somehow I’m getting this down, and I won’t stop now. I just need every word to be perfect, every sentence. It needs to encapsulate exactly what I remember and exactly what I want it to, for it will be surely the only recounting of the tale that has so long wrenched my heart and kept me silent. I have had these sentences, these words linked by a single chain of memory, stored in the recesses of my brain for weeks now, months, years even. But now, as I try to recall the exact verbiage I wished to use, they escape me. I can imagine them now, shuffling behind the layers of my brain, trying to hide from the light that will eventually pull them out. They were safe in there. But it is time.

And for them, it is the end of their life of safety. Just as it was the end of her life. But it is also the beginning, for they will forever be trapped on the page. That is a better existence than the transient life they would spend in my mind. But obviously, these words have no sense of what the future would hold. Neither did she. Neither did I. Neither did you.

And that’s why I say that each story in life is the beginning and the end. Because it was the end and the beginning of my life. And of hers. And of yours. 

Dreamt
April 8, 2012 at 19:07.

I have dreamt
  of castles from fairytales, with spires and
  minarets and onion-shaped domes that
  caress the clouds and torment the tempests.
I have dreamt
  of gardens and graveyards and gallantries
  that wake me with their ethereal touch
  and rock me back to sleep with their lullabies.
I have dreamt
  of love, a love that calms the sea and 
  taunts the moon and occurs without the command
  of the heavens, between you and me.
I still dream
  of you, of me, of us alone with our love and
  the short syllables that change our lives forever,
  that sound very much like “I love you.”
I still dream
  and when I wake
    it’s like I’m still dreaming
      except it’s our very real reality

the weight of love (in tribute to E. E. Cummings’ “i carry your heart with me”)
April 7, 2012 at 22:03. 

the weight of love is often too heavy(it weighs down
on me)i feel the aches(for your constant tears,they hurt,my dear)
i fear
your eyes(for darling they are what plague my being
and they are what cause my smiles)when you
blink (my heart skips a beat,it really does,my dear)
and it’s you are the warmest day of the night and it’s you
are the names of the stars and the constellations,my love,
that sing me to sleep 

here is the deepest truth nobody knows
(here is the heart of the heart and the soul of the soul
and the love of the love of our love,my sweet; which grows
larger than the eye can imagine or the mind can create)
and this is the wonder holding our breaths and
keeping our hearts from beating in unison

the weight of love is often too heavy(it weighs down
on me)
 

Why Not?
March 27, 2012 at 1:04.

But even if we are different people—
  and, us, we are really quite different, you know—
We shared a long embrace,
A tacit acknowledgment that you’ve never been
  warmer
    than
      in
       my 
         arms?
Tear-stained shoulders, august eyes,
Your hands on my wax-stained, paint-splattered jeans,
Your voice resonating in my mind, a choke
In your smile—

But how, how could I possibly, how could we possibly
live life to the fullest
  —if I know we shall never be together?—

Because, let’s face it, you and I,
In this time of barren cold
You need the warmest arms—mine—that you can find. 

Broken Glass
March 15, 2012 at 0:53.

This house is too full of 
memories
Of you.
Your words echo through the halls,
Your writing splatters the crumbling walls
And sometimes, just sometimes,
I can see you in mirrors and pieces of broken glass
As the sun rises and the stars fall. 
Go away,
dear,
For you are not welcome in this house.
The doors were built of stone
To let me be alone,
To force myself to forget.
But with your heart in two on my dinner plate,
It’s difficult to lose your visage in my mind.
And thus I wait,
Wait for the pain to abate,
For this to become easier,
For your presence to disappear from my eyes. 

The Captain—Sonnet
March 13, 2012 at 0:19.

Traversing the beach, we paused in the sands
And noted a sign pointed toward the sea;
Shaking off pebbles and shells from our hands
We stooped to peruse the ominous plea:

“O dearest traveler, from both near and far,
Be astounded by one so enchanted
As myself, the great captain, without par
To those of myth or song who’re incanted.”

And sans halt we clasped both our hands as one,
And o’erlooked the captain so oft o’errun. 
 

Leap Days
February 29, 2012 at 2:39. 

he felt so lonely, so ephemeral, so mistaken
so at peace.
he was lost in space, invented only by 
scientists, those beings with white coats and glasses 
behind microscopes, dealing with solids, liquids and gases
or finding gravities, velocities and masses.
he was not like the rest of them,
invented inherently at the beginning of time
and revered ever since.
he was of the sun,
whose exact calculated rise/set ratio 
happened to have an extra quarter day,
an extra six hours.
and being of the sun,
he gets to peek up his ever-blazened head 

once ever four years.

but isn’t once every four years
better than
not once, ever?

because, honestly, with me and you, 
sometimes I wish that you could
let it happen, just let it happen,
but not once in a lifetime
—not even once every four years—

can convince you otherwise. 

Peaks
February 17, 2012 at 18:19. 

But after we sauntered 
   up, up, up
Far past the mountains and hills
And snowy peaks of a million
moons and a thousand
suns
Far past the valleys of green and white
Where lay buried our treasured souls

After hiking thus far, for so long
   up, up, up
We realized that
   the clouds were only vapor 
   the stars were only bundles of light
   and that we were not the same people as merely moments before 

Bones
February 20, 2012 at 14:51. 

You had one of those dreams again, one of those midnight tempests in which you laid awake for hours until the daylight clouded the atmosphere just so that you could escape. It was one of those dreams that tempted you to believe in reality, where reality was not what it seemed. Where you were certain that when you were alive, you were merely somnolent, lost in thought and lost prayer and lost in the darkest workings of your mind.

It all began after hearing the cracking of bones. You heard, once a very long time ago, by a scientist at the lecture hall, that bones that you don’t use for a long time can just crack when you put more weight on them, when you adjust your frame of body and frame of mind to focus more and more weight, more and more focus, more and more stability on a certain bone. And it worked with muscles, too, he said. You joked and said it might happen with your heart some day, that one day you would use it and it would crack after being dormant and inept for so long. You were jocular that day, with the setting sun braiding your hair and the fires that lit the sky only embers and ashes. Your august, wild eyes darted around the room, but simply. I laughed.

Your inner mind could not just simply forget these times as you wished it would. Which is why you forced yourself to stay awake, to turn your senses off so as not to hear each movement creak and crumble like the breaking and cracking of bones, so as not to hear my murmurs into your mind that left you so deeply haunted and scarred. You preferred the reality of loneliness, darkness, obscurity and chill (it was winter and the fire had died out hours ago) than to that summer day in the lecture hall. 

Why?

I’m just as perplexed as you are.

Sailing
February 19, 2012 at 16:18.

We were enamored with it all, with the 
  paper words
and the
  paper dreams
that floated in the empty, vaporous atmosphere between us.

And as our love sailed away, on
  paper waves
and on
  paper sailboats
we realized that not even
     paper
could push us apart