For five minutes I wept and shook in your arms
For five minutes you embraced a broken man
all the mess was gone, all the walls gave in
For one minute you held my face in your hand
For one minute I pressed my cheek to yours and breathed
finally a real breath, not a gasp or a fight for air
For seconds you looked at me again like you used to do
For seconds the world was gone and it was just us two

For a moment
I was home

Faded things
and colors dulled, or so I had presumed
alas it is not so,
the vividness of your touch upon my memories
the weight of all the want
the cresting waves of burning thoughts
fiery breakers and seething streams of all the long lost
but forgotten not,
wash upon my wakeful hours.

I smell the baking bread, catch the shadows in the room
I watch you sitting there, eyes fixed upon your work
We feel the hours
I feel your skin
Eyes open, the pain begins

Winter is coming without you, all the blushing in your face
Spring will be absent its color, all the silver of your eyes
Nights will be longer, mornings bitter, moments hollow
I will be broken with no reach for repair

Always my sunrise
Always there

You are still here aren't you, lingering in the lullabies
In the memories of that soft goodbye

Go away!....no, stay.
Wherever you are, good night.
The dark will always belong to your eyes.

So many sharp shards of things have been flung between you and I
Words like weapons of war, spat out and screamed,
yet even such words are nothing in the shadow of this great good bye.
What do I do now, now that the bleeding will not stop
and memories pour out from the ravages of all these broken things?
We are the broken things, and O how we bleed my dear,
silent drops of pain rushed to flowing crimson fear, festering with regret.
And there lays the quiet corpse of home, I hear the grave diggers now.

But perhaps there is still hope
perhaps the dead can live again
perhaps when we have gone farther up and further in
we will find home again

What words have I to say to you,
you the author of all speech and sound?
What dare I to bare before your eyes
that you did not know before and look on still?
In the marrow of my dreams I still ache for dawn
but to confess this wish to you, is to speak it to myself
and the weight of such a visage I cannot bare
for all is gone, all is lost in the mess of minutes, miles, and hours!

Come for me if you ever loved me once and if you love me still
invade the place that is your own by right, come and break this will.
Tarry not, I taste sanity only for a time
but soon these rhythms will change, notes will leap upon a line
and darker eyes will open from these prayers
eyes which I wish I had never learned to call mine.

Have mercy on me
and if this unstable plea should whither in my mouth
Have mercy still
for I am most quietly ill

Images of a wanderer flood the the vision of my minds eye
heavy footsteps falling full of memories, dust kicked up and blown
by heavy, weighted, breaths with the rising and swelling of a chest
and in this chest there is no room for Him,
pain and parting have consumed the space,
the wreckage of decision, sealed shut the door for grace.

The face I recognize, and recoil at the eyes
it is I who hath no room for Him, but it is He who would not make a place.
Is not He the mighty one, of whom the ageless stories tell
who vanquished death and shut the gates of all the boiling throngs of hell?
And here am I a simple fool who hath no room a midst the throbbing of my pain.
If I not can make Him space, is that the end of all the God that ever was in me,
is this the end of all the light that ever aided men blind as I to clutch to see?

Oh Father, it all lays firmly on my head, I am the transgressor and the dead
but you were always more, more and more and more! Never lacking to overcome
all that my stubbornness ever had in store!
Now I am a wanderer again, and still, I rest my eyes upon the visage
of the one place where you are greater than, yet found sweetly in,
all that I have swallowed and defiled, broken and reviled
I rest my eyes to search once again for the clarity of place
a hill where truth still stands stretched from hollowness to home
a place where I can still be found and still be called your own.