Her beat had been so bastardized that a tree had grown to protect it;
To harbor silence in pandemonium.
Isolation was the only remedy to a disease persistent to turn past into present,
So she grew on her own terms, and her heart beat for no one but herself,
Because to let someone in, meant to risk axing away at the barricade she had worked so arduously to withstand.
When she fell into him the first time, the wounds were preemptive.
Her brittle bones cast away at the hopes that he would see her heart before her mind;
From which idiosyncratic branches wrapped around her fingertips,
And the oak shards springing from within, just barely inching away from his own heart.
Strangely enough, he didn’t seem to mind.
When he stripped to bare back the scars were evident,
They cascaded from collarbone to the dip of his hip.
That’s when he brought her closer and whispered marvelously:
“I would bleed again for you.”
At the beginning, the boy hurt,
Yet he still saw the heart it held between the prongs of wooden cage.
So he continued to hurt, for her.
His mission rooted in the purpose of painting her the canvas of what life ought to be.
Penciling in the possibility of a reality where her aching shoulders could be lifted,
And a new smile plastered onto her lifeless frame.
He painted her in the image of who she used to be-
As if he knew her before she grew weary at life’s expense.
In the canvas, the wooden cage had disappeared, and a luminosity introduced itself.
He had uncovered her heart, and no longer was it encompassed by a shell, but freely beating;
Beating for him.
Every morning, day in and day out, meters of her branches gradually retracted,
And the boy’s scars gradually sealed over.
Oddly enough, it seemed as if they had healed each other.
That the quiet embraces they held each night didn’t pierce him,
but rather comforted his mind that this time, it would be different.
Somehow, she would come to love him, and him, her.
She saw in him a soldier; whose battle wounds were ghastly.
He had lived through hell and came back to dispel the stories,
But instead of stories of agony and woe, and anger and spite,
He spoke of the morning dew on dandelions reflecting the sun’s rays and how they most beautifully sprung from nothing.
He spoke of the quiet whispers of the wind bringing music to deaf ears.
He spoke of how if you listen closely, you can almost hear each cricket sing its song
in a field of thousands.  
Each time he kissed her,
he did as if it were the last.
Each time he held her,
he did as if she were asleep.
Each time he healed her wounds,
he did as if they were preemptive.