but it's difficult
when everything
around you
is so beautiful;

beautiful and fated
for disaster
and decay.

you sound like broken glass
and your hands..
your hands,
are otherworldly creatures
roving over my flesh
like so much unclaimed land.

I smile, I hate you.
punched out cigarettes
lie smoldering in the ashtray
and I thought I could hear
the point of impact
in your hurried sentences.

I'm not worth the trouble,
I never wanted this anyways.
I just wanted to stand
at the edge of where the sea
meets the land and
taste the air in May.

I just wanted to know
what it
*felt like.

in a city that breeds hooligans
ingrates and indecencies,
where the architecture of a lost era
crumbles into brothels and madhouses,
where shootings peak
with the heat of summer,
where new windows are boarded up daily
and we chop down trees like fanatics,
in the city I call home,
in the city I love,
destroyed by its ignorance,
I am condemned to silent pleas
and empty stares.

perpetually human,
romanticizing the madness
of a world that's come undone.
oil paintings of the sea
hang upon the walls of our minds
and we marvel at the sorrow
mimicking beautiful colors.

cryptic fingers stroke our egos
and tell us that we will persevere,
that we are the ******
of evolutionary prose.
lunar rays beam down on us,
shrouding us in a gentle glow
and we almost believe
that we could be infinite.

it's too late to fret
about decisions made
and ties cut, past tense.
it's hard to see it
without the glaring minutiae
of my demise.
I'm scanning the walls
for a change of subject-
Polaroids and butterfly carcasses,
city skyline sketches
and old cigarette advertisements
in gilt gold frames;
satisfy yourself.

my mind is saturated
with degenerate cogitation-
a stew of pantheons
and painstaking nihilism.
my bones are brittle
and begging to break
and my eyes are growing heavy,
with the weight of it all.

but I've an inclination towards
laurels and violet,
celandine and foxglove;

the wildflowers you plucked
in the sunlight of our summers.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
voracious daydreamer,
how dare you
upset this delicate orbit.
your hands were the kiln
for my sloppy and misshapen mind,
but that was nothing,
relatively, compared to the way
your eyes reflected lost souls.
my dear, it's a catastrophe.

now when the moon chides me,
and the stars reek of your smile,
I run my hands across
the fronts of empty dresses
that you wore years ago.
Ophelia, Ophelia,
I recall the way your eyes shone
like the peak of madness
and how your shoulder blades
touched in a subtly avian manner.

how simple are the remnants
of your existence, of your melancholia,
I cling to them like a ***** to touch-
and I know they will bring you no closer.
stale shadows haunt my lingering eyes;
where you should be standing
I see only lost time.

Ophelia, Ophelia,
smoldering star in my hindsight,
stone in my chest-
I'm sad to see you go.