.

Dear Patient,

Here’s the prescription
I promised to write
Just like any doctor might do

An extended leave
A southern location
A room with a beautiful view

A candlelit dinner
Moonlight and roses
A bottle of chilled chardonnay

Romantic music
Soft summer kisses
Sending your worries away

The one of your dreams
An evening together
Love on a warm summer night

A sunrise good morning
Breakfast in bed
Satin sheets woven in white

A day in the sun
Drinks on the river
Affectionate moments for two

Take all you need
There’s no expiration
Unlimited refills for you

Signed,
Your Poetic Physician

If the person you love
Is truly
Holding you up
Then there's no way
You could fall
For someone else

We speak the true tongue
a language formed
in the deepest trenches
of the earth's oceans
those places where life was formed
where the elemental heat
of the planet
expresses itself
in steam, confusion
and eruption

We sing in the true tongue
music that is blind
yet sees all
its rhyme set to rhythm
a motion of flesh-hung bones

We stand against every fate
yet our song will endure
it will be the last song

And we paint
with a palette stolen
from the sky
on the day of the most perfect dawn

We are God's thieves
stealing a line here and there
dipping a sad bucket
into a river of stars
holding it proudly aloft
the heart shaped into a song
perhaps a poem
nothing more

Yet more than nothing.
And more than enough.

I.

No, don't go now. Please
don't go now; the fog is creating ghosts
out of people and we're breathing clouds out of our mouths.
Tell me about that time when you held your breath
under the lake for six years and still survived;
tell me how if I do that, it'll never work.
I'm not a sea God
any more.

II.

My knees tell better stories than my tongue
ever did, please don't; wretched hive harangues
the mind in a plague, can't you see I'm holding you down
and telling you you're all I ever wanted,
you're all I ever wanted; your head is the stuff of dreams
you're all I ever wanted; you can put your arm
right through me and only feel mist;
I am fog. I'm creating ghosts out of you.

III.

Make it up to me in a rainbow of hues of grey;
at the end of it I'm holding my ribs open. I've never
been more colourful and sad at the same time.
You're the mirrors to my house; stay
has always sounded better than don't go

yet neither seems to work anymore.

I don't belong to myself.

These atoms that frame

Everything that I am

Aren't even mine.

These cells don't especial

My small being.

Because they belong

To the extinguished stars.

They belong to the suns

Around which orbited

Planets of all shapes

Of all matter,

Around which orbited

Their moons.

I don't belong to myself

I belong to the

Extinguished

Heavenly bodies

Whose light probably

Still travels, wandering,

Lost without a source,

Just like human souls.

Every scintilla in my being

Belongs to the dark abyss

Of outer space, to the stars

That once shined, to the stars

That someday will,

To the creatures we'll never

Even know existed,

To the creatures that will

Never know we ever did.

I don't belong to myself,

Because the weight

Of my body is and

Forever will be

Too heavy for my soul.

-

tjr

No one ever tells you how hard it is.
I say no one ever tells you because you have to feel it for yourself.
You may have heard stories, but you will never know the struggle until you go through it yourself.
I'm talking about how to love
Or how not to love
You see, everyone makes it seem like it's a fairytale and everyone gets their own prince charming at the end of their own book.
They don't see what happens behind closed doors.
Do you know how long it took to write that book?
Do you know how many mistakes the author made?
Do you know how many times he wanted to start over and start a new story?
Go in a different direction?
Replace a character just to find out that that person was needed in ways us as readers will never understand?
Yes, in the end, we all get to experience the happy ending
But at what cost did it take the author to get there?
How many times did he struggle until he just...
Settled?