A shadow lingers, heavy and cold,
Never a story of joy retold.
Tablets lined in a fragile row,
In their silence, what do they know?
Dreams dissolve in a bitter hue,
Emotions dulled, both false and true.
Promises whispered: "You’ll feel whole,"
Relief bottled, sold to the soul.
Every smile feels borrowed, thin,
Shaky hands hide storms within.
Still, we swallow, day by day,
A search for light in skies of gray.
No cure, just balance, a fragile dance,
To numb the ache, one last chance.

You take your time to write yourself a muse
Upon the brittle branches in the August sky
Colours of lilac and violet dance across the sky
The sun settling in the distant end of the earth
You write the stories of the world you lost
The world that could have been upon yours
And I write to you in moments of hurried frenzy
And blissful fragments of fragility that laid its self across my body
The August sky,
You take your time to be as such
And the bottle of wine across the line of glasses that sat on the dinner table
How can one not feel younger in the presence of being loved
Of walls that to be brought down from being guarded for one to long of a moment
A moment that became a lifetime all the August months ago
A cold August it was, to dance around fire embers in the hopes they’d touch your heart and you could be as one in the flames

Ice is cracking
Under the immense
And unforgiving
Weight of lead skies.

The world is falling,
Plunged into
The vast and punishing
Waters below.

Her lips dissolving
With the cosmic
And unwavering
Chill of the void.

A last breath reverberating
Below the colossal
And vengeful echoing
Of a final word.

Uttered in mourning
Of a momentary
And fragile
Life.

The main theme of this poem is um, triumph
So uh the secondary theme of this poem is defeat?
How could that be? Is that even what a poem is?
Is my life a song? Is this the ******* chorus?

Something crawls up from the drain through the ***** dishes and out of the sink. It grips me! It’s got me!

[This is the part I want to hide]

I saw a man so beautiful
Rarely is there ever a beautiful man--
a man so beautiful you want to kneel
and scream “You’re so beautiful!”
But instead I’ll worship him in the ways he insists:
by stepping aside on the sidewalk,
by laughing at the jokes he steals from me,
by squandering the money he pays me to do his job.

Is my life a song? Is this the ******* chorus?

It took me three to four years to learn
the difference between worshiping and begging,
between faith and belief
And now I have neither and engage in both and yet
My life feels like a free coffee and bagel
My life feels like an unwrapped candy bar
My life feels like a compliment from a stranger
My life feels like a birthday card with cash in it
Is my life a song? Is this the ******* chorus?

This is my once-yearly poem.
It’s like a broken perfume bottle at the bottom of my bag.
Look at it-- read it. Smell it.  Literal swill.  Most things make me feel sad, even more things make me feel threatened, especially this poem.
What is there to do but put my head in my hands?
What is there to say if not sorry?