Someone asked me to draw
Draw what heartbreak looks like
I finally got tired of drawing a broken heart
And I started drawing you

I don't want a forever love
I want a love that keeps me up
makes my fingers and toes tingle
love that fills me from my lips
through my spine and into my heart
I want wild love from a gentle soul
who understands how to feed
my mind and my body with poetry
words whispered for me alone
through fingertips and tongues
a lover whose tenderness heals scars
whose kindness is contagious
and whose passion is inspirational

Autumn escapes
leaving a void, a disquiet
a haunting pit,
a yearning to renew aches

And I saw candles in the skylight
That forced me to look outward
Their flickered flames in twilight
Made is so there was not an echoed word

I looked upward, onward
At a world ending above me
As if a deaf man’s silence as he hears
The first strings of a symphony

Under that purple and crimson sky
The masses joined my gaze
Looking to horizons, not one eye dry
As endless candles floated in the haze

The sun it set, or did it burst?
A gasp, a rush, then no more
As candles fell from darkened sky
And set fire to the floor

But I will remember the penultimate
The flickered flames in technicolor sky
The beauty near the ending for which I was present
As all and all and all said goodbye

Let us leave for foreign places
Away from this city of boringly beautiful faces

For ash filled cobbled stone streets
Fields of blooded roses and golden wheat

Castles cemented in antiquity
Crumbling walls of barren cities

Abandoned cathedrals of a bygone era
Smoke filled bordello backrooms with mirrors smudged by mascara

Let us leave before the hours turn late
And I have wasted my life awaiting fate

But I grow old
And warm dreams turn cold

How stunning you look tonight
How badly I want to tell you these words I write

I used to live near water
spent summers on the island
in cottages near the eastern ocean
I picked sand dollars and saw whales
back then I didn't realize
what force the ocean holds
that it will drown you just as quickly
as it will carry you home
I would rather die than hold my breath
dive heart first and get carried away, lost
there's nothing on the shore I love
I ache to feel the water once more
playful waves hugging my skin
in the depths of the ocean, I find home

they say the gods grant you
a wish if you build a thousand
origami paper cranes
I have built a million of them
using the finest coloured paper
from stalks of bamboo written in ink
each flies with a wish I've made
hundreds with the same whisper
that you'll find me again someday
they say good things come to those
who spare the life of a spider
I've spared every spider I have ever seen
since I was six years old, I was careful
talked to them often, quietly
so they wouldn't be lonely like me
gave them droplets of water late at night
and asked them if they would help me
find you again some day, too
now, good luck visits me late at dusk
when I dream of your countenance
my reward is the sweetest night
bliss at the moonlight against your softness
though I wake, alone once more