The world sits before fingertips
like piano keys yearning in stillness.
I become nervous
and flood the possibilities with sinking ships.

Thats what childhood gave us lost ones.
the ability to understand probability,
realistic expectation,
no fairytale miracle to rescue our slipping love.

We may be sarcastically prepared
but where does that leave room for hope?
There is no hope in the live broadcast of bodies falling from towers
nor in the closets full of kids hiding from loving fists.

After all, those who lost innocence too soon
need a reason for the soul
more than the noble lie of love.

Some try to replace their love with circles.
The heartbroken soil of earth,
littered with mathematicians and linguists,
is now veiled between narrow strips of light,
revealing each unconscious glove,
fact checking their painting upon bright,
calming their hubris with symbols,
excluding truth in dark night.

Those with wandering toes
try to ascend to the sky,
twist toward the ceiling of branches,
attempt to swallow books of romance,
then settle into tree roots,
only to find their bones
broken by different forms of fate.
Crying out with constrained lungs,
their heavy thoughts
often coat lonely lullabies of our comfort.

I wander in and out of the striates,
brushing fact and wanderlust
with fingerprints of lonely curiosity,
pressing reflection upon papyrus.
Occasionally seduced by poetic freedom,
my hands make an attempt
to climb the bark of lost songs.
Yet, I always fall from the ascent
upon the same destination,
our graveyard.

Refusing to accept your silent departure,
I watch a young boy scream delusion
at our crumbling faces.
I place coveted trinkets
of blue bonnets and snow white sand,
simple moments of easy sacrifice,
at the feet of your flaming alter.

Our inky history swims into my nose
as I press the pages to thirsty pores,
smelling the scent of what was.
The ode to flaw reeks with rot.
So, I remove the last page
before my burnt hands
reverently let the others fall into the fire.

I stuff the last page into my throat,
letting the black liquid and white paper
become a part of my changing nature.

I find hope in this power,
The simultaneity of creation and destruction.
It soothes my tidal doubts with encouragement.
The piano player must love the ancient poetry
destroyed in the birth of each new ballad.