There are nights when desire becomes a tide so deep it nearly drowns me, and all I can do is let it rise. I sit in the quiet and feel the weight of you moving through my thoughts—slow, warm, inevitable. And with every breath that remembers you, tears gather at the corners of my eyes, not from sadness, but from the ache of wanting you beyond language.
They fall like small confessions, each one carrying a trembling piece of my longing. I try to wipe them away, but they return—persistent, tender, honest. They taste of craving, of the fire you leave smoldering beneath my ribs, of the way your name moves through me like a soft, irresistible command.
I crave you endlessly. Not in a passing way, not in a moment that fades, but in the deep-rooted sense of desire that refuses to sleep. You live in my pulse, in the quiet between thoughts, in the part of me that reaches without ever touching.
If you could see these tears, you would know how completely you unravel me—how my longing spills over, again and again, with your memory at its center.
Once upon a scattered verse, I woke inside a sentence that refused to end. Ink dripped from the ceiling like old rain, letters crawling the walls, whispering my name as if they knew me better than the world ever had. The room was built of margins, left and right pressing inward, and every breath tasted like dusted books that had not been opened since their spines learned how to crack. I could not tell if I was young there, or old, or neither at all. Time doesn’t matter when no one is watching. I carried a pen like a dull blade, hoping if I pressed hard enough it might finally cut through silence. Outside the window, the moon hung crooked, a pale editor with nothing to say, and the stars looked like misplaced punctuation in a sentence no one bothered to finish.
I wrote because the quiet was too loud. I wrote because the walls leaned closer every time I tried to speak. I wrote about rivers swallowing names, about lovers who forgot the sound of their own laughter, about graves filled with unread prayers. I wrote until my fingers bruised purple, until the paper drank me dry, until my heart learned the steady rhythm of erasure. But no one came. There was no knock, no breath beneath the door. The world moved on with cleaner hands, scrolling past my life like an advertisement they could not skip fast enough. My words lay stacked in neat little coffins, titles etched like headstones, waiting for eyes that never arrived to pronounce them alive.
I imagined readers the way children imagine ghosts, half-hoping, half-afraid, convinced they were near. I pictured someone under a dim lamp at midnight, finding themselves inside my metaphors, feeling less alone because I had bled honestly. But imagination is a cruel lullaby. It tucks you in and leaves the window open for despair to climb inside. The nightmare deepened. Libraries turned their backs on me. Bookstores locked their doors with polished smiles. Even the wind refused to carry my lines, dropping them in gutters where rain smudged meaning into gray apology. I watched my poems age without witnesses, their voices cracking like neglected instruments left to rot in quiet rooms.
There is a special kind of decay reserved for unseen art. It does not scream; it wilts. It curls inward, questioning its own worth, asking if beauty exists at all without a gaze to confirm it. I felt that rot settle inside my chest, a slow mold growing over hope, soft and persistent, impossible to scrape away. I tried to write lighter things—sunrise, redemption, hands finding hands—but the words knew better than I did. They sagged, heavy with the truth that joy still wants to be witnessed. Even happiness grows lonely in a vacuum. Even miracles want applause, or at least a quiet nod from someone who understands.
So I returned to the dark. I described nights that chew on your spine, mirrors that refuse to reflect anything kind, dreams that end right before salvation. I became fluent in grief, conversational in despair, because sorrow, at least, kept me company. It sat beside me like a loyal stray, sharing its bones, never asking me to stop. I wrote my name again and again, afraid it would disappear if I didn’t. I tucked it between metaphors, hid it under enjambment, hoping someday someone would find it like a pressed flower in an old book and wonder who I had been. Legacy is a fragile thing when no one is listening.
The nightmare showed me the future. My notebooks boxed and labeled miscellaneous. My hard drive failing without ceremony. My words dissolving into obsolete formats. There was no obituary for the poems, no footnote acknowledging their effort. Just silence, vast and unmarked, stretching farther than language could reach. I screamed, but it came out as sentence. I begged, but it shaped itself into paragraph. Everything I felt turned into something beautiful, and that was the cruelest part of all. Beauty with no witness is still beauty, but it hurts like loving someone who will never learn your name.
At the center of the nightmare, I met myself as a child, holding a notebook too big for his hands. He looked up at me and asked if anyone heard us. I searched for an answer strong enough to survive the question and found none. So I lied. I told him yes, someday, because hope, even when false, is gentler than the truth. When I woke, the room was the same. Morning did not change anything. The world still spun without my voice, and my poems still waited, patient as graves. But I sat up anyway. I picked up the pen. Not because someone was watching, but because stopping would mean the nightmare had won.
I write for the unseen. For the maybe. For the never. For the chance that one day a stranger will stumble into my darkness and recognize it as their own. Until then, I haunt the page, a ghost made of ink and persistence, dreaming of eyes, dreaming of touch, dreaming—still—of being read.
Once upon a broken heat I learned that loneliness does not arrive loudly. It does not knock or announce itself with ceremony. It seeps in, quiet as dusk, and takes a seat beside you as if it has always belonged there. I remember thinking that friends would come naturally, like breathing, like weather, like something no one ever had to explain. I did not know then that connection was a language I would struggle to speak, that depth would be my native tongue while most people preferred simple phrases and quick exits.
I tried to make friends the way everyone else seemed to. I smiled at the right moments. I laughed when laughter was expected. I learned how to talk about nothing at all for long stretches of time, though every word felt like gravel in my mouth. I wanted to ask the questions that mattered. I wanted to talk about grief and meaning and the way memories can bruise you without warning. Instead, I learned that too much honesty empties rooms. People like the idea of depth until they feel the pressure of it pulling at their lungs.
Some friendships began brightly, full of promise, like candles lit in dark rooms. We shared music, secrets, fragments of ourselves we did not show the rest of the world. I believed that meant permanence. I believed that once someone saw you clearly, they would not leave. I was wrong more times than I can count. People drifted. People changed. People decided my sadness was too heavy to carry, my silence too loud to ignore. They left without cruelty most of the time, which somehow hurt more. There is nothing to fight against when someone simply fades.
I mourned those friendships in private. There are no rituals for the loss of the living. No headstones for people who stop calling. No ceremonies for being replaced quietly. I replayed conversations late at night, searching for the moment where I became too much or not enough. I wondered if depth was a flaw, if craving meaning was something that needed to be cured. I tried to make myself smaller. I tried to speak less, feel less, need less. It never worked for long.
Then came the deaths. Real ones. The kind that do not return your messages because they can no longer hear them. Names that once filled rooms reduced to photographs and past tense. I watched people I loved disappear into the earth and into memory, and something in me hardened and hollowed at the same time. Grief rearranged the furniture of my mind. Every loss taught me how temporary everything is, how fragile every connection becomes once you understand it can vanish without warning.
After the funerals, the world expected me to continue as if something fundamental had not been removed. Conversations returned to normal. Laughter resumed. But I carried ghosts with me everywhere. I heard the dead in quiet moments, felt them in the spaces between sentences. Their absence became another companion, one that never asked me to explain myself.
It was then that the blank page became my closest friend. It waited for me every night, unmarked and unafraid. It did not judge the darkness of my thoughts or ask me to soften them. I could tell it everything. I could confess the resentment, the envy, the exhaustion of trying to belong. The page absorbed my words and held them without recoil. Ink became proof that I existed, that my inner world had weight and shape.
I began to understand that writing was not a hobby but a form of survival. When people left, the page stayed. When voices went silent forever, the page listened. I poured my losses into sentences and watched them transform into something almost bearable. Metaphor became a bridge between my pain and the possibility of being understood. Symbolism allowed me to say what I could never speak aloud.
I crave depth because shallow water has never taught me how to swim. I crave conversations that leave marks, that change you slightly after they end. I want connection that acknowledges suffering instead of avoiding it. I want friendships that understand silence as language, grief as history, and sadness as evidence of having loved deeply. This craving has cost me people. It has also saved me from living half awake.
The solitude did not leave, but it changed. It became quieter, less cruel. I learned to sit with it, to let it speak. In the absence of others, I became a witness to myself. I documented my own survival in paragraphs and fragments. I learned that being alone does not always mean being empty. Sometimes it means being full of things no one has asked you to share yet.
I still lose people. I still grieve. The blank page is still my truest companion. But within this solitude, I have found a strange, aching honesty. I write to remember the dead, to honor the friendships that could not stay, to speak the truths that make others uncomfortable. I write because depth demands expression, and silence would kill me faster than loneliness ever could.
Once upon a midnight fear, you will not see the echoes of my tears, because they learned to walk softly, barefoot through the house of my chest, passing clocks that cough and calendars that bruise. This is how the story begins: the way sleep explains itself to the sea, with a hush mistaken for mercy. There was a town once, built entirely of punctuation, comma streets and ellipsis alleys, where laughter leaned like tired lampposts and rumors kept bees. I lived there briefly, renting a window, watching the moon practice apologies in the tin mirrors of rooftops. Satire was the local weather, a persistent drizzle that made even statues blink and reconsider themselves.
One evening the ground cleared its throat. Dogs began writing letters to the dark. Teacups clinked like nervous teeth. The earth—an old poet with arthritis—shifted a word and cracked the sentence. We called it an earthquake, because we are afraid of naming confessions honestly. I was carrying a pocket of stars then, contraband hope wrapped in a receipt, when the tremor bowed politely, like a waiter, and asked my name. I gave it a nickname instead, because truth grows shy in public, and the nickname tasted of copper and rain.
Stories fell from shelves, their spines sighing as they hit the floor. A map unlearned its borders. My shadow slipped on a metaphor and laughed, which felt briefly illegal. In the dust I found a childhood still warm, still breathing, counting marbles like prayers. Satirical saints wagged their halos and said this was character development, selling postcards of ruin with inspirational fonts, while a sparrow stitched the air, threading silence through rubble until the silence held.
I followed a crack in the street the way one follows a river that already knows your future. It led to a theater with no roof, where clouds rehearsed tragedies and understudies called thunder. The stage manager was a patient ant keeping notes with crumbs. There, a woman named Gravity sang lullabies in a minor key, braiding ankles to floors and memories to doors. She sang of falling as pilgrimage, of bruises as stamps in a passport, and I stamped willingly. Dreams queued politely nearby, holding numbers, waiting to explain themselves. One wore my father’s coat and smelled of winter and oranges, and told me to forgive the ground for wanting to move on.
The quake softened, a loosening hand. Buildings exhaled. A piano found its missing leg and forgave the floor. We swept metaphors into piles labeled Later, Maybe, Never, and pretended this was normal. At dawn the sky brought coffee; steam rose like a forgiven rumor. I wrote apologies to the cracks and they wrote back, unsigned, saying they only wanted to be heard. I pressed my ear to the street and listened to the earth practice empathy.
I left town with a suitcase of aftershocks, each one a small bell. On the road, satire waved from ditches holding signs that promised detours to meaning. I laughed, then slowed, then listened. Time limped afterward, hands bandaged with patience, agreeing to walk slower for the wounded. Neighbors traded sugar for stories and salt for names we forgot to say. Mirrors learned manners, tilting their faces to flatter survival. A philosopher in the square juggled apples and dropped questions on purpose, saying certainty bruises easily and doubt is a feather mattress. Children chalked hopscotch across fault lines, jumping from Before to After, their laughter forming a bridge no engineer approved.
Bread rose despite instructions. Yeast preached resurrection to ovens. We ate metaphors warm, buttered with relief, crumbs mapping constellations on our shirts. Someone toasted absence and clinked a glass, and the glass forgave gravity again. I mailed a letter to the future without an address, only a mood. The stamp was a leaf. The postmark read, Whenever you’re ready. The future replied with a dream wrapped in newspaper, smelling of ink, the headline screaming that I survived myself.
Night rehearsed gently then, a lullaby with commas for stars. The moon stopped apologizing and listened. I slept with my shoes by the bed, in case the earth asked me to dance. Now the town is quieter. Punctuation has grown gardens. Ellipses bloom like pauses. Cracks are filled with gold because we learned a trick from old bowls: breakage can be an instruction manual. I keep the bells from my suitcase and ring them when words grow stubborn. They remind me that movement is a language, that fear read slowly is only a letter begging for context. So I write softly, and the ground answers softer still, and if the page trembles I breathe ink, count heartbeats, trust margins and footsteps, trusting that even endings are temporary shelters humming quietly while we learn balance beneath forgiving skies.
The poet’s tears do not rush. They gather slowly, like words circling a thought they are afraid to land on. They rise from the chest, where memory keeps its quiet archives, and they taste of all the moments that were almost spoken but never survived the air. Each tear carries a small history, a sentence unfinished, a love that learned to live in silence.
When they fall, they are not asking for mercy. They are translating feeling into something the body can release. Salt becomes language. The face becomes a page. The tear traces a line the poet could not yet write, slipping past grammar, past reason, past pride. It is a confession without audience, a prayer whispered to no one in particular.
Some tears are born from wonder—how beauty persists even after being wounded, how light still finds broken places and calls them holy. Others come heavy with grief, thick with nights that stretched too long and mornings that arrived empty-handed. These tears do not shout; they endure. They know the shape of loss and the patience of waiting.
The poet wipes their face and pretends the moment has passed, but it never does. The tears dry and move inward, settling between metaphors, breathing beneath the pauses, softening the sharp edges of truth. They become the weight behind every line, the ache that makes language honest.
For the poet’s tears are not an ending. They are the origin. They are the quiet proof that something mattered enough to break open, that the heart dared to feel deeply in a world that teaches restraint. And long after the eyes are dry, the tears remain—alive in the prose, asking the reader to feel them too.
I write poetry the way some people light candles in a dark room—not to banish the darkness, but to learn its shapes, to watch how it bends around the flame and softens its edges. There are things inside me that refuse the straight lines of sentences. They coil and wander like rivers that know where they are going but refuse to hurry. Poetry gives them room to meander, to flood, to leave their mark.
Silence has always spoken to me in color. It arrives as indigo pauses, amber echoes, bruised violets of unsaid things. I feel it humming in my ribs, tapping gently on the chest, asking to be translated. When I write, I am not inventing feeling—I am uncovering it, brushing dust from what was already breathing beneath the surface. Words become a prism, splitting a single ache into a spectrum of meaning, each shade telling its own quiet truth.
I write to bleed without injury, to confess without a courtroom, to lay my heart on the page without asking it to behave. On the page, pain becomes ink instead of weight, beauty becomes honest instead of ornamental. Every line is an act of alchemy—grief turned gold, longing turned light, memory given a second heartbeat. The past loosens its grip when it is named, when it is allowed to sing instead of haunt.
Poetry is the one place I am not asked to explain my depth, to simplify my storms, or to quiet my wonder. It allows me to be both blade and bloom, thunder and prayer. In its margins, I am free to be unfinished, contradictory, human. I can stand barefoot in my own contradictions and call it truth.
I write because time erases so much, and poetry resists erasure. It bottles moments like fireflies, small and glowing, refusing to disappear. It teaches me to listen—to the ache beneath laughter, to the hope hidden in exhaustion, to the sacredness tucked inside ordinary hours. Writing becomes a ritual, a way of kneeling before life as it is, not as I wish it to be.
At the Jackknife Tavern sits a man, drinking his loss of love away. Beside him come and go a myriad of faces, men and women with lives sometimes down and out, perhaps sad, at times inspirational, always human. These are friends and neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers… Each with their own story to tell. The poet remains on his barstool, taking notes and creating art from life. Award-winning author and poet Braeden Michaels treats us to his eighth collection of prose poetry.
I have come to love the sincere curves of you the gentle tremble of your hands, like leaves drifting on a breath of wind, the way your laughter spills softly, tiptoeing over itself into warmth, how your eyes cradle shadows that shimmer like morning dew catching the first light.
Your imperfections are soft constellations only I have learned to trace each scar, each pause, each sigh is a small lantern glowing quietly in the night, illuminating a world that belongs only to you.I would follow those lights endlessly, for they are the tender poetry of your being,the secret melody I hear when the world goes still.
I love the gentle angles of your thoughts, the corners of your heart that curl quietly inward, the way it folds like a paper boat floating on a river both calm and restless. There is a fragile beauty there, a whisper of magic in the way you simply exist.
I do not wish to smooth your edges; I want to lean into them, like a stream caressing stones, like a hand resting in the warmth of yours. Every imperfection is a brushstroke, painting the luminous masterpiece that is you, and I am endlessly, endlessly in awe.
So remain tender, remain luminous, remain human.I will stay here, in the quiet glow of your light, celebrating every soft, jagged, radiant piece of you for in your imperfection, I have found my home.
I find myself lost again in the thought of your lips—those exquisite miracles that seem less like flesh and more like a divine language written just for me. When I picture them, I see not a mouth, but a soft geography, a map of tenderness where my heart learned its compass. I could spend lifetimes tracing their shape and still never reach the end of their meaning.
Your lips are scripture, love—verses that tremble with every breath you take. I’ve stood before them in silence, like a pilgrim before the dawn, waiting for them to part, for a whisper to become prayer, for a sigh to rewrite my faith in beauty. When you speak, it’s as if petals fall from some hidden garden, and I catch them all, pressing them into memory until they bloom again in my dreams.
There is sunlight in them—some secret that gold itself envies. Even silence bends to their will, becoming music when held between the quiet edges of your mouth. I’ve seen oceans try to mimic their curve and fail; I’ve watched the moon blush, humbled by their glow. You are storm and calm all at once—two worlds meeting where your lips touch, two horizons breathing as one.
To kiss you is to taste eternity. It’s to drink from a chalice carved of longing, to drown willingly in a sea that feels like both sin and salvation. Your lips carry the ache of wanting and the promise of forgiveness. When they touch mine, the universe forgets its order—constellations scatter, and gravity itself bends to your pull.
And then, there’s your smile. That gentle, radiant unveiling—how it feels like sunrise entering my chest. When it appears, my shadows flee. When it fades, I’m left rummaging through my own heart for words grand enough to hold what I feel.
Your lips are not just beauty, my love—they are the doorway to your soul. They hold laughter, truth, and a thousand unspoken yeses. They are the red pulse of life itself, the tender wound of being alive, the rhythm of everything I adore about you.
If all art is born from longing, then you are my masterpiece, and your lips—my altar of worship. I write this not as mere admiration, but as confession: I am endlessly, helplessly undone by the miracle of your mouth.
Every time I look up, I see you. The sky becomes your mirror, an infinite canvas painted in your likeness. The dawn blushes like your skin when the sun first kisses it, tender and slow, like the universe remembering how to love. Your beauty stretches beyond the horizon, endless, breathing, alive. The clouds drift like your thoughts, soft, mysterious, always moving, always reshaping the light that falls through them.
You are the sky when she’s calm, when the world seems held together by a quiet sigh. You are the whisper of blue between my ribs, the soft ache of wanting something too vast to hold. I find myself tracing the air the way I long to trace your spine, carefully, reverently, afraid I’ll break the silence that makes you divine.
When night falls, your beauty deepens. The stars scatter like the goosebumps on your skin when I whisper your name, and the moon turns to silver just to resemble your glow. You are the night I want to get lost in—velvet, sensual, infinite. Every flicker of starlight feels like your breath, every shadow a secret curve waiting for me to explore.
There’s something about the way the sky changes that reminds me of you. The way a storm builds—slow, electric, dangerous, beautiful. The way lightning cracks open the dark like the truth of your eyes breaking through my guarded heart. I want to stand in your storm and let it drench me, let your passion soak through every defense I’ve built. You are not gentle wind—you are the wild pulse of thunder that makes me feel alive.
Sometimes, I imagine lying beneath you, beneath your sky-body, tracing constellations across your skin with my fingertips, naming each one after the moments you’ve left me breathless. I’d call one Eclipse, for the way you darken everything else when you enter the room. Another Aurora, for the light that dances in your eyes when you laugh.
If beauty were weather, you would be every season. The sun-warmed blue of spring, the blazing fire of summer’s dusk, the melancholy gray of autumn rain, and the crystal silence of winter’s night. You move through me like the wind, unseen but unforgettable.
My love, when I say you are beautiful, I do not mean it in the small way people use the word. I mean you are the breath between worlds, the endless horizon my soul leans toward. You are the dawn I wake to and the twilight that undresses the day. You are the sky itself—ever-changing, eternal, untouchable, yet somehow, miraculously, mine for a moment.
If I could, I’d bottle every sunrise just to pour it across your skin. I’d steal every star to hang in your hair. But even the universe isn’t enough to frame you.
There are nights when language collapses under the weight of you. When every word I try to write turns into a trembling pulse, and the ink itself seems to breathe your name. I sit beneath the faint hum of the lamp, thinking of your mouth, your scent, the curve of your breath when it brushes against the idea of me. You are not merely a person anymore—you are an atmosphere I enter, willingly lost, deliriously drowning.
I desire you in ways that silence cannot disguise. You move through me like a fever I’ve stopped trying to cure. Every thought becomes your echo, every moment your shadow. I dream of you in pieces—the way your neck bends when you laugh, the way your lips seem to hold secrets that would burn if spoken aloud. I imagine tracing those secrets with my tongue, word by word, until truth and pleasure are indistinguishable.
Sometimes I think of you in the quietest parts of the day, where restraint pretends to live. But even then, I am undone. The thought of your fingers—how they might travel across my skin, searching, knowing—turns the air into fire. I would let you burn me down to ash if it meant being reborn inside your breath. I would trade a thousand calm lifetimes for one storm with you.
You haunt my imagination like a beautiful sin. Every fantasy begins with you walking through the threshold of my mind, uninvited yet expected, your presence an electric omen. I want the collision, the chaos, the unholy tenderness of our undoing. I want to forget where I end and you begin—to dissolve into the rhythm of your wanting until the world itself forgets to spin.
You are the poem I cannot stop writing, the one that ruins all other verses. I crave the weight of your gaze, the gravity of your silence when it settles on me. I love you in the way a starving thing loves its first taste of rain—wild, unmeasured, desperate to consume. There is something sacred in this madness, something pure in how unholy it feels.
When I close my eyes, I see us—not in perfection, but in ache. Your body against mine, not as conquest but as confession. Every sigh a psalm, every movement a prayer against loneliness. I want to memorize you in touch, to know your skin the way the night knows secrets: intimately, endlessly, without light.
Do you feel it too, that invisible tether pulling, tightening? It’s as though the universe stitched our hunger together and dared us to survive it. My love, I don’t want to survive it. I want to live inside it, to build a home in the wild pulse between your heart and mine.
If I could, I’d press this letter to your chest and let it melt there, word by word, until it became heat. Until all that remained was the truth beneath all language: that I desire you beyond thought, beyond restraint, beyond the limits of the human tongue.
I drown in my cravings, flames from your lips, and the desires from your tongue. I glare at my weaknesses with swollen tears. I hunger something that my emptiness won’t ever touch. I grip on to my fascinations and urges with insomniac eyes. I carry my loneliness on my sleeve and unapologetically unashamed for wanting your luscious skin.
The circle of my friendships get smaller, I make my myself distant the closer I get. I promise you, you will wish we never met. The hello’s will turn into goodbyes, I will make sure you can’t see the rain from my eyes. I will share more truths and you will want to run. Don’t be surprised of the person I will become.
I sink in my yearnings, scattered fantasies and the desolation inside. I dwell in my painted circles, faded memories and the opaque skies that leave me stranded in the bitterness. I am slightly disconnected, partially detached, and withdrawn from the cracks I wish not to see. I displace the stained hindrances and sanguine complaints within my state of consciousness. I am unapologetically unashamed for longing for your sentimental touch.
The circle of my friendships get smaller, I tend to make others uncomfortable with the things I shouldn’t say. I promise you, I will belong in your past and know you won’t stay. I expect no response and the late replies. I will make sure you won’t see the pain in my fragile eyes. I will be more open and will tell you how I feel. In the end, we will find out who was real.
Tease me with a scent of a captivating concoction Tease me with a crescendo of exhilarating moans breathe in the closeness, breathe out the chill
Tease me with sweetness dripping from your wounds Tease me with a heartfelt dance under our silver moon breathe in the hello’s, breathe out the spasm
Tease me with laughter from your winter storm Tease me with soft kisses falling on your pillow breathe in the sentiments, breathe out the fears
Tease me with a passage from your bone cold diary Tease me with a sizzling greeting under an oak tree breathe in the beginning, breathe out the endings
Tease me with a dream of memories and cozy rain Tease me with a clenching oblivion and devotion breathe in the naked sighs, breathe out the fragility
11:32am, situated on the corner of James Madison Boulevard and Whitman Street. I am sipping emptiness on the rocks in the scowling part of town, Jackknife Tavern. I’m sulking in the chestnut colored booth throwing darts at the bombastic God I use to love. I continue to taste the kisses of my skeptical past and shake hands with the skeleton of my future. I raise my clenched fist, “Hey brother, can you pour me another? If it’s not any trouble, make it a double.”
A Marylin Chambers look a like tapped me on the shoulders with an indecent proposal. I shook my head with a chuckle and a sleazy grin. “This isn’t a joke, I can only pay by the minutes or the number of strokes.” She disappeared like a magician with the smell of her perfume turning into an aphrodisiac. I swallow loneliness like an amber ale. Isolation is my best friend without a voice. I tend to make a midnight rendezvous with yours truly but my left hand shouts “I’m quite over zealous” and the right hand whimpers “I’m quite jealous.” I only tend to acquire sparks with jumper cables.
Between noontide and the teardrops of the moon, the carnival weaved in and out of the cavern. The hooligans are tap dancing next to the jukebox, the husbands are window shopping, the cut throat whistle stoppers are juggling negotiations and plastic speeches. The jamboree was full of exaggeration, plagiarism, copycats, and satan’s storytellers. I could hear them drinking the tears more than the alcohol.
2:35pm, the regulars and bystanders strolled in with folktales dripping grief. Cigarette smoke reeked of melancholy and satire. The ambiance was filled with extravagant bar tabs, sobbing cliffhangers, romantic comedies with the mourning saxophone playing in your left ear. If you listen close, the excuses and irritation can be heard in your right ear. A pint of desolation will taste sweet and a shot of despair will run down your throat faster than a horse at the Kentucky derby. It’s a relief and a head scratcher that we call it happy hour.
5:45pm, the eyes are dry and my stomach grumbled. The gin mill is as empty as my crooning soul. I can never make out the lyrics but I get goosebumps when I hear the sorrowful piano. Harper Guthrie struts in with his graveyard black t-shirt with the phrase “You can get this body for $19.95 for one hour, but if you act now I will make you as happy as a sunflower” printed on the front. Harper is jammed with acidic antidotes but will sell you antidepressants, antibiotics, and antisemitism.He talks with his wandering hands and pleads innocent until proven guilty. He will boast about his latest purchases, meaningless job title, and the abundant cash flow problem. He serenades to the audience that he drinks to happiness. Unfortunately, he’s been charged with terrible humor and convicted of lying to himself.
7:15pm, Jackson Bryant fumbles in with his auburn acoustic guitar. He glances at the minimal crowd from the undersized stage and begins to strum. Out comes a raspy but yet a smooth sound “You can find me in the dark trying to grip the wind, you can find me feeling lost not knowing where to begin, you can shout from the depths of your lungs, you can point your fingers at me and forget the person you’ve become.” Heads turn and faces become pale as if they seen a reflection of themselves. The song ends with the spectators clapping their hands rapidly and shouting out his name. He continued to play his set as the crowd was quite allured by his presence.
As the night begin to fade, the exchange had less of a bounce. Solitude was a fog prancing in front of our bloodshot pupils. I wrote “Goodbye, Goodnight” on a vanilla napkin and handed it to the gargoyle next to me. It was time for me to face the chorus in a song I didn’t want to play. Thirty five years ago on this melodic day, I married a ballerina that is still spinning on her tip toes of my crippled heart. The King of kings took my queen away. She was plagued with a disease that had no cure. I’m done praying to a God that doesn’t listen. All I know how to do is to fill up my glass with destitution to try to take away the overwhelming misery.
Greetings taxpayers, screen wanderers, and head nodding citizens, let’s dive into the ramifications of ignoring the siren of western civilization, where the infrastructure has had a crack for generations, the colors of the flag have become evanescent, where celebrities are glorified more than soldiers, where the all mighty dollar has more value than life,
Let me introduce myself, I am the Headstone Prophet, the accountant of distractions and destruction, I don’t see black and white, gender, classes, or status, I see authority and figureheads with meaningless titles serve themselves rather than society, I see inflation and corruption welded together to spark the genocide, I am the soothsayer that is gawking at the cemeteries, counting the caskets, I wear a tattoo on my middle finger that reads “The new world order doesn’t deserve a quarter,”
Behind closed doors, the henchmen are sipping on wealth mumbling “if you aren’t rich, you will become my bitch” and the others are ranting “if you aren’t in the grave, you will be my slave,” the catchphrases are lightning and the thunder to their ears, the powers that be want division among the dwellers, they crave disunity and friction, for every label there is a asterisk and a war,
It’s time to pay close attention to these staggering numbers, human trafficking is up twenty percent, the dishonesty among politicians is up a thousand percent, the media will twist the truth fifty percent, the longer you are glued to a screen the quicker you will forget the american dream, in the end the government cares about you is zero percent,
I am the headstone prophet, I stand before you to be the alarm, I stand here to wake up for those who are asleep, I stand here to deliver the most important message of your life, I stand here to hopefully avoid counting your coffin,
(1st Verse) I was born with symptoms of a transparent disease midday convulsions, cynical eyes, buckling at the knees I am stuck with satirical and catatonic eyes, I carry a tapestry of black and scarlet goodbyes, I hear my ghosts playing in a symphony singing my riddles I reside in the flames of the sunset with my anguish crying in the middle
CHORUS: I am the color gray gripping on to my rage I have a sister that screams that seems to never age I have a brother that reads my eulogy from a blank page I am infatuated with the rattle in a cage
(2nd Verse) I was born with my lungs full of wide eyed devastation morning sickness, sarcastic limbs, with my eyesight feeling irritation I am a bottle of endless and crude pills I can feel saliva dripping down my disorder seeking a thrill I can hear my villains playing the violins as I lay out my confessions I reside in the orchestra of my darkness clenching on to my obsessions
CHORUS: I am the color gray gripping on to my rage I have a sister that screams that seems to never age I have a brother that reads my eulogy from a blank page I am infatuated with the rattle in a cage
Bridge: Recklessness is my illness and medicine God laughs at my horrific skeleton I hold hands with Satan’s storytellers I sleep under a rose sky beside the bottom dwellers
CHORUS: I am the color gray gripping on to my rage I have a sister that screams that seems to never age I have a brother that reads my eulogy from a blank page I am infatuated with the rattle in a cage
CHORUS: I am the color gray gripping on to my rage I have a sister that screams that seems to never age I have a brother that reads my eulogy from a blank page I am infatuated with the rattle in a cage
I’ve been in love with the nectar and the sour drippings of you I’ve been captured by the glaze of your caress I’ve been in awe by the comfort and the shivers of your embrace I’ve been enamored by the never ending kisses and the affection I’ve been mesmerized by the sparkle dancing in your midnight eyes
And the love with you is breathtaking And the love with you is indescribable And the love with you is remarkable And the love with you has opened me up
After so many years I wouldn’t have changed a second
I’ve been in love with the honey and the radiant treasures of you I’ve been enchanted by your words and glamorous skin I’ve been aching for the centerpiece to wake me up and feel alive I’ve been daydreaming of an endless love I’ve been intoxicated by the shimmering light twinkling in your soul
And the love with you is breathtaking And the love with you is indescribable And the love with you is remarkable And the love with you has opened me up
After so many years I wouldn’t have changed a minute
I lay here in unloved skin with a ghost surrounding my unwritten pages I lay here in a whirlwind aching for you to fulfill my desolation with worn out tears I lay here with shadows crying and spelling your name with my fingertips I lay here in a cloud of passion missing your serenity wrapped around with my flames
Cover me in a blistering love Cover me in tender confetti Cover me in a bold yearning
“Come a little closer and don’t be afraid to feel, let’s get lost with what we know is real, Come a little closer and give me your recklessness, Come a little closer and fulfill my emptiness”
I lay here in unloved skin with an unhinged appetite boiling within I lay here in a frenzy circling for you to entertain myflammable wishes I lay here with fantasies exploding in luscious air I lay here in obscurity of devotion sweltering on the inside
Cover me in a sky of hope Cover me in tears of respect Cover me in a weeping bliss
“Come a little closer and breathe in our scent, come a little closer and feel where our dreams went, come a little closer give me what I long for, come a little closer and see you are all that I adore”
you could be the lyric that I never wrote you could be the nectar fawning on my tongue you could be the feather against my cheek you could be the warmth on my lost face you could be the song that repeats in my mind
And in the morning chill, I can taste the harmony off your skin And in the brisk moonlight, I can hear your symphony burn from your lips
you could be the melody that awakens me you could be the lily I see in my holy dreams you could be the breeze I never forget you could be the fear that I have forgotten you could be the song that repeats in my mind
And in the morning chill, I can feel your poetry in the chorus of my weary soul And in the brisk moonlight, I can recognize your violins in the orchestra
you could be the instrument that sparkles you could be the goodbye that is never uttered you could be the unspoken and endless limerick you could be the sorrow that turns into halcyon you could be the song that repeats in my mind
And in the morning chill, I can watch you play the acoustic guitar whispering your poetry And in the brisk moonlight, I can see pieces of myself you savor in your tragic song
Storm of Ink 