The wanderer takes a bow at sunset as if it were his own creation,
The darkening wisps of light and color painted across the sky by the brush tucked behind his ear,
The paths twisting through the trees below him a manifesto wrought from his tired mind,
The nightingale’s twilight salute a symphony played to his ears alone.
Night comes, and he lets the hours slip through his fingers
as he searches for the secrets buried at the bottom of the bottle clutched so tightly between them.
He watches the moon travel across the sky,
Wishing he could travel at its speed,
God’s speed,
A speed that would set him apart from every other man with a pair of boots and a lonely heart.
His mind is a poem unspoken,
When he breathes he sees the wind as if it were filling the lungs of the earth,
Giving life where there was none,
Bringing words to the back of his throat where they shimmer and shake and disappear,
Leaving their watery reflection in eyes that dance with a youth lost to the tired lids that close over them.
He watches water crawl across stone
Boring holes in the sides of mountains
Yet his feet leave no trace behind him as he travels
Though he feels them burst with the power he wishes his heart contained
In a world measured in centuries he is the ghost of a moment passed,
The remnants of a smile still tattooed on his blistered cheeks.
He has long since buried his morals alive in the coffin of society,
Hammering in the nails like offerings to a dead king.
I met the wanderer once as my thoughts followed his well worn path to places neither of us would ever reach,
To the stars that gave birth to god in the hearts of men whose minds lied open like blank pages
waiting to be filled with words they were too frightened to call their own.
He walked into my mind as if into the arms of an old friend,
No more a stranger than I to the ebb and flow of my nocturnal being,
Nor to the stream of consciousness that runs like blood through its veins,
Twisting and turning and throwing itself into the night from which it came.
He stood on the lofty precipice of passion,
Searching for something to hold on to,
But the lantern that he held like a child in his arms cast shadow on that which he wished most to illuminate.
Morning came, and the wanderer took a bow at sunrise as if it were his own creation,
He turned his back,
Took with him the night,
(his sole companion),
And I, caught in the storm of his thundering wake, watched him go,
As he had come,
In silence.