My heartbeat races
A marathon per minute
And the familiar static of
Discomfort returns,
Muscles constricting
Beneath my skin

My hands like tiny
Earthquakes shake
With each shallow
Labored breath I take,
Heat rushing to my face
Staining it with red

My mind casts illusions
On indifferent faces,
Tilting their heads
‘Til they stare
And whispering words that sting
And simmer in the air

I smile with my mouth as I
Fumble over pleasantries
But my eyes burn with tears
That are dangerously close
To spilling over and
Revealing the fear behind them.

Oh that I could love
And be loved in return
To feel warmth in the hearth
Of my heart
And not the icy emptiness
Of darkened stone
That seems to whisper
"You're alone"

Perhaps this ache in my throat
Would briefly dissipate if you
Tied your heart to mine,
Stitching the delicate pieces together again,
Though I thought them
Irreparable

You, the faceless figure
Whose absence I have
Known so long,
A phantom wish
Robed in my hopes,
The name on the tip of my tongue
That I can never seem to taste.

These foul slithering figures
Don’t dance across the page
As they spill from my pen
Dripping, smudging, bleeding
They sit and idly stare.

Language is deceiving,
For words cannot weep
Or scream and cry
They do not laugh
Or dream or sigh

They twist themselves in knots
And feign sincerity,
Tangled on my tongue
A thick web of
Self-proclaimed eloquence

With each sullen rhyme and
Insipid adjective
I am convinced
Of the lies in these disguises;
Words are futile devices.

Skeletal trees
With their barren, scraping bows
Shiver and sway in the half light,
Branches desperately reaching  skyward
Aching to reclaim the golden leaves
That Winter stole in it's bitter rage
Clawing and tearing
At the faded warmth and
Cloaking the world in its
Deadened, icy shadow.
Autumn's gilded age
In it's evanescence
Dissolves into a turbid dream
And shrivels in the ice
Grasping the delicate remnants
Of a time long past and sifting
Through ancient forests of memory
Lost in the glittering particles
Of a fierce December storm.

I never thought that what I wanted wasn't you.
That the truth of this illusion
was that I was infatuated
with the idea of
being loved.
That someone could attach themselves to
one so flawed and scarred as I
with shadows cast deep
In the recesses of my mind;
What a silly dream to conjure.

Filled with electricity I floated,
Eyes clouded by the smoke of the sparks that you lit before me
And in the haze it wasn't your face that I saw
It wasn't your hand that I felt in mine as you pulled me in
To this accidental web of ours.
It was the face of an idealized daydream
the hand of a whispered wish
that I hoped had come true.

Naïve dreamer
Blind wanderer
The masquerade was ending
But I needed you
To be the one that I saw
behind the smoke.
Desperately I tried to shape you into him,
But you stood before me
An imperfect sculpture
That I was determined to fix.
But what right had I?

Truth broke the surface of my withered hope and shattered me.
Thousands of fragments of glittering glass dreams littering the floor
You were not mine to change
Not mine at all
And I was never yours.