Beneath the twilight’s tender glow,
A melody drifts where soft winds go.
Once vibrant notes, now whispers low,
Of times and dreams from long ago.

A fleeting strain, a lover’s sigh,
A waltz beneath a starry sky.
Its rhythm danced through hearts so near,
Now fades to shadows we barely hear.

The keys once struck with fervent grace,
Now linger, lost, in time’s embrace.
Yet in the stillness, faint and true,
The echoes hum their mournful cue.

Oh, song of yore, where do you lie?
In whispers soft, or the weeping sky?
Perhaps within a heart’s deep sea,
Still blooms your haunting melody.

Though time may dull and mem’ries wane,
Your tune forever will remain—
An echo laced with joy and pain,
A song that sings of love’s refrain.

You know I long to be
The one you call your destiny.
So won't you say hello?
This love is haunting me,
And I just want you to know.
The memories we’ve made
Still keep me awake at night.

Thinking of the past

I still remember a lot --


Much more than I knew.

In that golden hour
when memories fall
like photographs from
some upturned valise ,
☆
Covered in esoteric symbols
like the record of some
bizarre travelogue through
magic , time and space .
☆
Faces shimmer in the
cool night air .
Those ghostly lanterns
then disappear in a
mist ,
☆
While forty-two saints read their lives .
The Knave , a Sleeping Princess
and the King of Hearts ,
all gone now and
dust stops their mouths .
☆
But in another century
blazing with the fire of
a thousand suns ,
then giants walked the earth
and made all time their own .
☆
Though now , as I sit here
in this solitary room
marked by time's passage
and the romance of decay ,
☆
They seem to live still ,
more vibrant and bejewelled
than the phantoms of daylight
and their prisons of the mind .
☆
In dreams they speak to me
in foreign tongues
and in curious manner , like angels
they confound my understanding .
☆
In daytime they leave messages
and strange symbols ,
in numbers and
words that are not there .
☆
The Moon is shining bright .
Their voices sing in the wind .
Everything is just a story
and all of it is real .

I was smitten from the first time I met you.
It’s just a feeling, like...
When you look at me, I can’t even breathe.
I was just a little boy with a crush on you.
But now, I don't know.
Maybe it’s just too late for us.

Some days on back I sat on a pub’s oak stool
and drew in the musty smell of its past,
its scent of old leather and spilled beer that pooled
under the floorboards in a sticky mass.

An old man came in and pulled up a chair
and he scratched at his stubbly beard.
His grey eyes had fixed me in a granite stare
and rumbled ‘til his raspy throat cleared.

He said, “The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from Greek stems.
It means the pain of homecoming.
We look to the past through a cataract lens
at a ‘home’ that’s made out of nothing.”

I asked, “You can’t go back to your home again?”
He shook his head, a woolen wisp of a sigh.
“That home exists in the land of pretend,”
he softly exhaled in laconic reply.

And then he stood and slipped away home
while the strains of “Jerusalem” played.
I sat in my cloud of memories alone,
from fog emerged in the present to stay.