A misty, windy evening
She glances out through the window
She thinks of her life,
All the way she has been through
She smiles wide
Her childhood surprises her
She feels like it was a fantasy
She remembers it's innocence,
The fearless and the careless days,
Her lips widen :)
The day is so faint, so colorless
Yet, it brings so much to her
Like she is related by blood to the day,
She breathes it's air
She feels the wind
that strikes her skin and her feelings,
She remembers the place she was born
She remembers her home and origin
She remembers the struggle she has made
And she puts up a smile onto her face.
There's lightning and there's thunder
All of a sudden,
Raindrops pour down the earth
She smells her roots with the drops
She is overwhelmed
She watches the raindrops
Slowly and silently getting absorbed by the earth
Giving the earth it's greenery, it's lost color
And it's sense of life.
It makes her feel like
Her struggle and her tears are also accepted
In the same way like the raindrops
Giving her life it's meaning
Transforming her into better each day
Making her learn the lessons of life
Making her stronger and tougher
And above all,
Making her smile each day with all the remembrances and reminiscences.

The place smells the same. Garlic, undergraduate angst, oven flame.  The menu hasn’t changed. The Antony and Cleopatra.  Italian sausage and snake meat. The Macbeth. Cooked in a cauldron.  Blood sauce won’t wash off. The Julius Caesar.  Served bottom side up.  You have to knife it from the back. The Timon of Athens. Only bitter, separate ingredients, overcooked to black. The Frankenstein.  Assembled from ingredients at hand.  Served smoking from a jolt of high voltage. The Dramatic Irony. It’s a surprise.  Everyone at your table knows what you’re getting while you cover your eyes.

You said tragedy means playing out a ****** hand. The game has to end badly. Bigger Thomas. Joe Christmas.  Hamlet.  Everybody dies.  No choices. The end. I said, no, it means you have a fatal flaw.  Macbeth and Ted Kennedy—ruthless ambition.  Gatsby—pride. Lear—vanity. Richard Nixon—douchebaggery, deep-fried. Bad choices.  

“Can’t be both,” you said.  “One is character, the other one’s fate.” “What if character is fate?” I asked smugly. “Then we’re *******, Heraclitus. It’s late.”

I smoked a pipe.  You wore a beret and severely bobbed hair. I wrote sarcastic love letters to the universe. You wrote hate lyrics to Ted Hughes, love notes to Jane Eyre. We kept relations on an intellectual plane. You had a set of big firm ideas, dark-eyed principles, and a dimpled scorn of life’s surly crap. My eloquence was tall, square-jawed, curly, tan.  Together we solved the world’s big problems as only undergraduates can.

“Can pizza be tragic; or is it merely postponed farce?” I wondered. “Here it is clearly both, though not at the same time,” you said. “Does tragedy plus time equal comedy?” “Sounds right.” “No, tragedy plus time is any order in this place on a Saturday night.” After what seems like decades our orders finally arrive.  

“What did you get?” I asked.  “Looks like the Double Tragic,” you replied. “Flawed choices and fate. I leave you. You were unfaithful to every love sonnet you ever wrote.  Yet you are the first man who makes me feel loved, the only one who ever will.  I strain for that feeling again and again but it becomes a boulder that keeps rolling back down the hill. And fate—my beautiful ******* that got so much attention from men will **** me.  The only thing they will ever nurse is a cancerous seed. You?”

“The Too-Many-Choices, done to perfection. Choosing everything means choosing nothing. Loving too many women, I love none.  I follow a simple path home but try to stay lost. Living in the space between lost and found has a cost.  My life becomes a solitary pilgrimage to no place.”

“Let’s not reduce our lives to a Harry Chapin song,” we agreed. So we toasted the beauty of what never was. I went back to my hotel to write, found my way to a few easy truths, and called it a night.

A cup of coffee
and a night of rain
To recall memories of the past
to pass the present in vain

Remembering all the moments
that together we shared
Drowning myself in laments
memories upon memories, layered

I wait for death to take me
And put an end to this pain
Till then..
A cup of coffee
In a night of rain.

Chewing the cud
can turn a long-lost spring
green

The older a cow gets
the more it foams
at its mouth

Things were fine just the way they were,
holding hands and locking lips.
Laughing and crying,
feeling every single emotion a human could.

Here in these hands,
lies every stanza, of my life.

His lips tasted of sour wine
a wine that takes the pain away.
A wine that I would drown myself in forever.

I think about you today
I remember the way
Your hand drifted
Onto my thigh
You stroked it ever so lightly
I let you
The air between us
Calm, not too hot
Neither was it cold
It was just right
I remember you now
Like an old sweater lost in my closet
Forgotten amidst all the brand new
But when found again
Deep within the membranes
Of memory after memory
It brings warmth to my body
A nostalgic smile to my lips
I miss you now
What we could have been
What if I chose you
What if I let your fingers
Stroke above my thigh
What if I let you take me home
What if we could have been more
What if
I can only say
What if
- soulwriterj