Have you ever been transfixed by the quiet beauty of the night?
She's mysterious in the worst way
You know she hides no unseen light at her core,
and yet you like to imagine so.
Have you seen
how she swallows everything in her path
with those tendrils of darkness?
She blinds you
and leads you
into what your sure will be destruction
beyond the black walls of her embrace,
But you go into that velvety unknown willingly,
unable to resist that dark temptation.
I have seen this.
I see her in the vulnerability of everything around me.
The quiet allure of voices on the point of breaking.
In sunsets and sunrises
because they are beginning and end
with no hope of as wondrous a middle.
In twangy guitar riffs
and solo violins,
Almost violent in their fragility.
I hear her beauty in ice breaking
Those arcs and swirls of frost
Patterns on its thin canvas
Cracking beneath boot
and snow
and even breath.
There's something so tragic in its brief life
And it resounds within me
like pity
and a recognition of how precious it really is
in a mixture
that I have come to define
as love of the most volatile sort.
I love Spanish guitars
And swing sets in the rain.
I love eyes above shots of bourbon
with their kicked innocence
and I love smokers' voices.
Smeared lipstick
and yesterday's makeup
tell tales of instability,
but all of my heroes are tragic.
I want to see their cracks,
like chinks in armor,
because this world is a hard one,
and the best things recognize that.
I like my music to be in mourning.
Soft, slow piano and whispers.
I like whispered promises not brave enough to be uttered aloud
My flowers dead and falling apart
My coffee cold
And my tea oversteeped.
I don't overstep to say it helps me remember how valuable things are if there's some imperfection.
I see things that I want to love
in the broken and downtrodden items
littering the sides of the road I walk
Some not imperfect
but insalvagable.
Beautiful in the same sad way
as smashed piano keys in pure white slivers on the floor.
The remaining keys
like a pitiful smile that says
"I'm sorry,
but I'll never create music again"
I can hear the ghosts of their creations.
I'm swept away
by that lost potential
and blown by the fact that it is gone forever.
I know that I cannot save the pieces,
but still seek to fill the gaps in those teeth
with bits of my own smile
so that we might at least make two halves
and have our songs heard again.
But in the end
they always sound like warnings,
ominously ringing out their weakness to the night.