I strung up Christmas lights on the trees in my mind
and haven’t taken them down yet.

Ask a question:
Let it dance on your tongue
like a child ballerina —
full of stutters and jumps
and hope.
As it spins circles
through your mind,
tears holes in the soles
of your shoes,
wait.
Let it fall swiftly and fast
so quiet it’s barely a whisper
if that at all.
And with no response,
let the hope fade
with a few tears
and maybe some scrapes
or bruises.
Just as the child,
pick yourself up
and walk towards the door,
allowing one glance behind you
before the soft click of it shutting
is all you can hear
and your locked up dreams
will never even know you were calling.

It's her words, I think,
that turn the world into gold.
Or, perhaps, the way her eyes captured entire soliloquies
and her voice took on a hint of an accent
as buttery, honey-soaked verses slid off her tongue
and filled the springtime air with such ease
that I began to wonder whether it was truly a poem
or just the lyrics of the thoughts that painted her mind.

And I know I've known her for a while
in that half-smile sort of way
and the contemplation of a wave as she passed me by
but suddenly there was nothing I wanted more
than to talk for hours under the brilliant sky,
the one whose windswept clouds were palaces
with moats of the most cerulean blue.
Though the sky may have once deserved only a passing glance
it was transformed before my very eyes
as she whispered its secrets into my awaiting ears.

I wonder, idly, what the world would be like
if she sang its soul into existence
and there's a small voice in the back of my mind,
one murmuring that perhaps she already has
but we're all too blind to see it.

"Icarus," I breathe
through my dreams of flying free.
The naïveté of the youngling I desired to be
was a warning sign to all that watched his descent.
It was not his disobedience that led to this --
to his body buffeted in the merciless winds and swept up by the sea --
but being blinded by boundless beauty through his kaleidoscope vision.
What more could one wish for than the all-encompassing euphoria
of weaving through the sun-soaked clouds,
of learning the meaning of freedom as you reach up
to brush your fingers against the sun?
What more could one know than wanting something so desperately
that every shiny red sign is just one more bauble for your collection
as you struggle to escape the empty abyss engulfing you from within,
as you let the feeling of bliss envelope you for one heavenly moment,
as everyone screams in tinny voices that you should listen --
listen! --
but at least you got this one second,
this one heartbeat of a moment,
to finally let the chains fall from your bloodied wrists
and spread your newfound wings for all to see, for you to see,
for once, for nobody but yourself
before tumbling to the beat of gravity's forlorn yet never-ending song.
And maybe he regretted it
and maybe I will too
but as I press my palm against the echo of the sunlit expanse
reverberating in someone else's memory,
one word slips from my parted lips:
"Icarus."