I wandered to the shoreline to watch the water kiss the sun. Never had I seen such a sky. Small clouds hung in the air, like bright crimson jellyfish that rose as angels from the ocean. I thought of him. What he was doing. What the sun looked like from the other side of earth.
"David...", I whispered longingly, hanging on to the first teardrop as the Pacific pulled it away. I lost.

Michelle was a cellist in the modern sense. I'd gone to all the shows that her string ensemble had throughout the city. I remember seeing their first show and gazing at how gracefully their arms held time within them. The music they created involved the entire instrument in every way possible. bowing, plucking, tapping, rubbing. You'd think playing like that would make the sound too harsh or out-of-place, but the sound was magnificent. It was as if the instruments were singing out their gratitude to be loved for everything they were. She told me that when she played, she imagined being in a paradise where every ounce of effort was a means to the same, beautiful end. She became one with the grandest orchestra, that played for nothing more than the rapture at beholding itself.

Music spoke to her in ways that poetry could never touch. Whenever she played, I fell silent with envy for the things she experienced that a poet could only wonder about. But then she would always remind me that i had the power to change minds, shift the tides of the human struggle with nothing but a few words, beautifully arranged. It should be fair, but it's not. The only writers who changed anything lived through hell and sometimes they survived. I was no hell-dweller.

Suggested Listening: Max Richter - Maria, the Poet (1913)

The horizon is dim, but waxing.

the morning, chilly and dewdropped.

i set the toaster and you walk to the porch

where you read the morning like a newspaper.

i have seen eternity in the light between our eyes.

in bodies made sacred by the closeness they share

and the millions of steam droplets that rise from our flesh.

whether friends or lovers in lifetimes to come,

no foe or distance may shatter this,

our breaths as one, our desires forgotten,

the moment our souls became complete.

I'm hiding my eyes, pretending to watch my own steps, waiting for the shadow of the angel of death, whose hemlock kiss shall quench all my desires in sweetest slumber.

But I suppose living should be our lesson in chance.

How we learn that none of this could ever have been written before, for no one would read it.

Or if it has been written, at least we're not alone.

It's so easy to write to the world

So difficult to write to you.

Your face is not pixels.

My voice is not thumbs.

The talk that we're looking for

glides clean from our lungs.

she was a phantom to him. more of a mystery than anything certain or concrete. And he was obsessive with her incomprehensibility. He wandered through her consciousness, lost in the thickness of its layers, forging relentlessly through every glance and silent pause. She would never give him an easy way in. Her ego could only be distilled from constant admiration. It was her high, her addiction, her every being from the moment she decided that romance would be her chemical. Falling in love would end her. So she set traps as he got closer, picked fights, held her silence. This one was abnormally persistent, sweetly coy. A man still in his youth. Passionate. The same emotion she had never allowed the thought of love to gain sight of. But passion is a contagion, a silent buzz in the minds of the close, and she couldn't escape disease.

When he'd reached where she was, he approached her gently, whispering the few words he could find. They'd been playing it so long. they didn't realize that there was life beyond the goal line. They stood in front of each other, her eyes welling up at the ability to feel love again. But his were of no tenderness or warmth. Instead, she found eyes full of misery. A man worn thin by effort without definite end. She had expected the visage of a lover. But a lover would not be so miserable to find another. The game had broken her opponent. Once a man madly infatuated, had become an old soul, numb to anything she could give to him, well-meaning or not. And she realized that there was no prize at the bottom of the box. For either of them. It was a lifeless concentration of all the frustrations long past that left scars. Scars they would trace over and over to remember the particular heartache that sadists find momentary fulfillment in.

And when she tried to find the source of the heartache, she found the same traps she had laid. The same silences and arguments. Except that the bitterness of his spite filled her lungs whenever she walked near him. Their game of persistance had become a game of revenge. And so they parted ways as an attempt at peace, still hoping to one day find the good in each other. Trusting nothing but destiny itself to the reigns of their lives.