You've Heard This Before

I tried to focus on your eyes
yet there is nothing calm about
this tremor building inside my palms;
these hands clenching fists
are also as delicate like
rose petal brushes against porcelain.

Yet if the glass is half full,
to some it is half empty; the point is
how long can you hold this glass?
What if I told you this cold heart and stone palms
freeze the water? When frostbite kisses
fingertips, and they fall off, earthworms will
grow from the empty sockets, and I
will tell them stories about the sun
and they will not believe me.

But while heartbeats reveal themselves
as they do, we turn off emotions.
They stack like sheets of paper,
hardening; they compress, paper
transforming wings, and
how sad it is that stone hearts
cannot even fly.

Story tellers have recited this song
for centuries, while I merely give you a remix.
I await inside lonely corridors
and even so, just because the doorknob rattles
never meant removing the chain from off the door.
I have loved a false messiah,
and when he makes wine I find him
huddled on the bed, his claws scratching
against the wall, howling inside moonlight
with rivers of crimson falling from his eyes,
and all I could do was close the door.

Do not go looking for keys to follow smoke.
If you do, as curious minds accept warnings,
promise yourself that you will not swallow bloodshed.

I will learn to love from a distance.
These forests are nothing more than
wild life continuing on, and inside my pupils
are beds of dead trees still holding leaves,
so I believe in multiple reincarnations
throughout one lifetime. I will
ink an angelic dove holding my broken heart
behind my right ear so I will always
listen to the Lord, as He is righteous.

Maybe this is just a cruel joke.
I have a bad habit of forgetting -
I double check locked doors
as the ravens are whispering the shades
of danger inside hazes of tragedy.
I leave the lights off, as this loneliness
is sculpted by the glow of a television
pirouetting waves disrupting silence.
The moonlight trickling through
cracks in curtains is my only mistress,
and even so, I do not recognize her anymore.
She whispers inside my ear,
as a memory transforms into ghost;
spirits of the past cast melancholy
and it chains me to this bed, so
when I tell you I’ve been so busy
I mean I’ve been busy ignoring
the opposite side of this constellation.

After all of this and more,
this is a mere game to the difference
between what’s in my head and reality.
I couldn’t fixate onto your eyes
for I have never felt comfortable around
astronomers; these stars are always dead
before you even witness their burn, and
I taste question marks of every passing season.
There are different hues of night,
and I couldn’t begin to explain them all to you.

I tremble with a quickened heartbeat
for these magnitudes off your seismograph
has left me with broken ankles, so
I shall wait for winter to freeze this path,
and I will glide away on icicle heels.
I will let you go.
For love is too strong
to say it out loud, to pen
wrenching images alongside
a word holding candles
inside this darkness.
And if I can at least feel this
for someone among the mazes
of mystery inside this corrupted
labyrinth stained into fragments
of stripped film making it
unbearable for anyone to decipher,
then my God, I am alive.
I must be alive.

You make me feel like I am supposed to be here.
You move me. You shake the world, rock
the sky with thunderbolts and lighting,
and I wish to outline the ink on your arms
to see if we have matching stories, yet even so,
as you move my world, I orbit around
a vast emptiness with just enough highlight
to reel me inside this cruel joke.

So as I get drunk off my pen
and lose sight of sense, I will
refuse to say anymore
I should go wash
my mouth out with soap.