An old man climbs into a vintage car
to smell the sweet upholstery,
caresses the steering wheel’s steel bars
and grips the gearshift **** of ivory.

He pulls the heavy door to close
it and hear its deep, dull iron clunk
that fuel-injects him with a dose
of chrome-clad metal hunks.

The streamlined car doesn’t move.
Still, it takes him on a favored trip
down a grey road well grooved
that his whitewall mind-tires firmly grip.

Its tires spin in grooves and sing
a well-pitched tune of rolling on.
Seams of concrete slabs now bring
the bumping heartbeat of this song.

His greying hairs match the road
which stretches out into his past,
leading him back in freeway flow
to a love that he’d made last.

For in a leather rumble seat
in a sleek car just like this one,
he’d kissed her hand and lips to greet
his sweetheart hunnybun.

She smiled as bright as high beams
at her motorheaded beau,
with wide eyes that stole his dreams
and made his fuel more quickly flow.

With hair like raven asphalt
framing lips in brake-light red,
in her saw he no faults,
but thanks to him, she’d end up dead

in a shattering crash
as they slid into a tree,
his youthful driving brash
and far too wild and free.

He swore to never leave
her by that bleak perditious street.
Resolved, he chose to grieve
her and keep the rumble seat.

So once a year he sits in this car.
He never drove again.
But each time it takes him far,
right to where his hunnybun had been.

The king of what was stands in silence
and surveys his sunsetted realm.
His spine is straight in stiff defiance
of the twilight of the kingdom he’d helmed.

On a plastered pedestal high he stands
surrounded by the waste of his times.
Carved into it, once acclaimed in his lands,
was his name, now covered by vines.

The pale sheen of low sun as winter nears
casts shadows across his etched face.
Its grooves grow deeper year after year —
he’s the gnomon whose shade this sundial has traced.

He takes no note of the thorny brambles
that have entangled his fixed stony feet.
With flinty gaze and wrapped in a mantle
of granite, he keeps watch through storms and sleet.

Now stripped of his titles and even his name,
the proud king of the ruin’s still there.
For while the long night has broken his fame,
still he stands, marked by his unbroken stare.

Spoken first, particular last
With a mightier introduction, ahead
Since sincerity, since seclusion, so fast...
Has the voice of a beautiful angel, awoken to lead...

Meetings of the mind
Continue in the voice, meager times
Hope and surmisal, can be so kind...
Letting a lost promise, become strength's trying...

Survival's prophecy, of the fittest
Where in, stirs of shared conscience
Is the can't, the cope of truth, a senses test...
Adage over communed liberty, overtly presence...

A tale of two liberty's
Shown a calling, a creed to instinct, due
Know a keep, beyond which is civility...
Ready an eye, of comprehension is anarchy's you...

Salt to salt, spice to spice
Where, out to dance among intuition's stars
Has the new voice, of now in love twice...
The rue of simplicity, the risk of summation, by far...

Here it is once more
- a dark form looming -
A shadow from Before,
A storm's mark, dooming.
.
Invisible vise grip,
the weight on my chest;
Marble-heavy crypt,
A thornbird's nest.
.
This hunter is slow,
patient, though relentless;
with no arrow, or bow,
or trigger to press.
.
His footsteps fall monotone
- finality's beat -
Like soot on a wall of bone,
the last defeat.
.
Although he'll stay
out of sight, a dark drape,
Know that his prey
might never escape.
.
When no one's around,
When comforts are few,
In the scent of moist ground,
He could find you too.
.

I was a dead body, decaying in decades of wreckage, buried in my tarnished land. Shape shifting into a muse that acquires its sunday best to stand tall, relentlessly.

And yet life is much wiser than to all of my whims, molding my heart as a vessel of my misadventures, and veins that bears my broken dreams. I still dance on a hard wood floor, memorizing the creaks on it; memorizing the fear of falling.

My skin and bone grows in unfamiliar love, shaped into a misery, it is morphed on my own garden of heaven and abyss, relinquished its life in romanticism and death.

satin black robe, maroon nails,
my cold palms on a colder marble balustrade,
the moon soaked rose garden,
and crying angels of that medieval fountain;

Beethoven creeping in the background
but still my heart didn't strung a sound;

All I did to find inspiration
still I'm going blank for years
words won't splendidly fill my unfinished fiction;

But still I'm here
grasping onto the midnight smoke
trying to give colours to my drunk imaginations;

My tired sighs now wished
that it'd be easy
to come up with words,
a missing lover
or a ballroom ******
or a heartbroken maiden
with empty goblets filling her scars;
anything would do now;

As long as this melancholic sonata goes on,
And before this cooing midnight
disappears into a blinding dawn,
You would find my impassive face
and desperate gaze
capturing floating words
to give a meaning to this new found romanticism;

Nihilated from naivety, only you
could prove despair isn’t the only truth,
and remedy everything that cheapened me.

Every empty fill of vacuous desire
ebbed away sentimentality
until idealism was an affliction,
a coerced condition.

Stripped of venom as armour
reposed in your words,
romanticism is no longer an abject territory.

You’re the memory
I silently ached to make;
the expectation too unrealistic to hold
until your arms became the sanctuary
I could deconstruct my defences for.