Nightshade-Valentine

sometimes there is nothing to say you want to say everything to make it better but only blank air remains and it leaves a sweet bitterness for no words can heal a wound so deep. we are failures: failures to act failures to foresee failures to understand after all, it is what we neglect that haunts us the things did not, refused, to do. but we should have. soon, a peace must come. soon waves will crash on our shores of regret. we will see. and we will forgive. and we will let go. as sure as the rolling tide. Sometimes there are no funerals: no going-away parties no denouement no winners or losers and no last wills and testaments. Sometime

Are the saltwater tears that soil velvet eyes in times of turbulence ever justified? Or when the wad of silken words once luxurient ribbons on the tongue are hard to swallow? What do you make of thoughts that have become shadowed figures amidst fog? What do you do with that muddy uncertainty? Is any unraveling justified?

On a naked mattress in an unfamiliar place I was swaddled in grey it was my mother's too long at the time for I had none. I was laying something fetal but the room was cold no comfort in this foreign womb I felt I owed something to the place the person I left. So in the shade sleeves clutched in my fingers a picture formed simple stick people a family that had been torn apart but I tucked it in anyways and left my home.

I never climbed a tree the same way I never learned to ride a bike or touched a hot stove I've lost socks friends and more trains of thought than I can count. After Mom left Dad the floor creaks in my house greeted me like an old friend The screech of windows shuddering open after a long winter the scent of green permeating the air a spring nostalgia but I'm burning in this skin and the cold steel cuts in this cage I've outgrown and my fledgling wings long to be stretched and feel the crisp winds of indian summer in my down.

The shattering of nightfall. Ebony glass intermingling with the last flecks of daylight embers resilient in the ink stained sky.

Hers was the way of snowfall A deep darkest blue and a delicate gravity Her voice was the whisper of the forest the murmurs of life hushed by tall pines. Her countenance I never knew for she hid in a face full of shades and an ebony gloom. I never met her for endless tendrils of trees halted me in my pursuit. But, in the starless dusk as darkness prevails the echo of a sigh carried on the breath of a woeful wind and I know she is there.

It was but a tremor at first. The flutter of yellowed pages but it grew. His cough rattled him as the moths in his lungs shook loose from the dust into his closed palm. Every wheeze was like the screech of rusted gears unused to fluid motion and rasped memories of coal and iron.

You had fallen apart again in a scattered wind Your lips parted with words unspoken But they were lost in the brine The rain that came stung your face where the skin had broken bleeding salt and bitterness Your face shattered like ornate glass And all that was left was the eyes i thought i knew But even those were empty as your soul was swept away with the tide