This letter was not meant for you
it was meant for me with you
to that crystalline time when we were two
before the shattering was through.
The mornings in
when we lay oblivious to the shuffle and the city din
when the weight of the world was still
not enough to budge us a single inch
from between the linens.
So I recollect
all the fragments I thought I left
I'm not one to dwell but what else
is left for the lonely boy at the bottom of a well?
But now there are three
There's you and there's me
and there's who we could've been
And I've not spoken to him yet
as I'm not sure this specter is real
Or maybe I'm afraid to ask if he once half-lived,
was he thrown from the wheel
and tossed down the well here with you and them?
But I've fooled myself again
What I saw as a window
was only a mirror that needed mending
And what I heard as your voice
was always the wind
hurling back at me my own laments.
Beauty brutally murdered my captain
One touch, and the crew deserted
a hasty mutiny to an unknown island
Where I before with calm weathered
the waves, now the torrent upends
the bow, wrecked upon rocks
that could've been havens.
So I'm thrown from the sea to the sands
Left alive by a wiser hand than
I, doomed to make beach castles, just a man
mending the grains, seeing the slate
wiped clean again and again
forever banned from the mountain
and the densely wooded lands.
One day I'll abandon my post
cut short my careful tending
and set off from the coast
Leave behind the crooked lines
and SOS signs, the feeble moats
Face the interior, each step deep down
and further down into the jungle dark
and every fear the most
Hope beyond all Hope that all I own is Hope
and one day reach the sun, then I'll know.
And what keeps me shuffling through the dark?
The thought of you shuffling too
alone and apart
Not the thought that our end
will be as our start
but that the art
of the whole **** thing
is all we are.