Whispers in the blinding Shadows,
Lacing their fingers around my heart,
Tighten their grip at every breath,
And send a dull ache that fills my head.
Oh you,
You haunt me.
I may not get to see the end of time,
but the simple fact that I’m living
for a span of forever
makes me feel infinite-
where every breath is a pulse,
every thought, a dream,
and every second, a risk.
And maybe that’s all I can hope for,
and all I ever really want.
She entered libraries
the way she would
cemeteries
& gazebos,
calm,
breathless,
toes on the tips
of what she calls
obscure,
but never for long.
Aisles and hallways and steps
and the scent of near-to-be-falling rain
send her to a cascade of a maze
of quills and pens and nibs
wrought into thoughts and dreams
and heartbreak.
She isn’t the keeper of secrets
on the white lines
of overly-opened
spines,
nor is she the coffee-table book
you open
when you’re bored.
She is a soul,
a ghost among the pages,
both the pen and the words
and the last stuttered poetry
you spoke.
i. You always looked
like you were heaving
the earth-
asunder,
bathed in thoughts and rain,
eyes glassy and glazed
with a fire
you stared at
in space.
You were nothing short of eternal
but didn't know it.
ii. I remember you as this:
a thunderous whirlwind
stuck in a still ocean breeze,
trying too hard
and failing
to be the calm in your storm.
You were cataclysmic,
in a beautiful, chaotic sort of way.
iii. But you forgot that memories
are stored as feelings.
Rosettes but not roses,
echoes and not songs.
And there you stumbled
and relived yourself
as how you thought
you should be,
s
How the Planets Say Goodbye by DSteffi, literature
Literature
How the Planets Say Goodbye
I would still love you then.
When the inked sky
fades into the stars
because we stared at them
too long,
when the pages of our beloved books
turn brown
from age and borrowing hands,
when the trees grow taller
and their leaves
fall off
like decembers
spent in
may.
I would still love you then,
but not the way I did before.
I like to lay thoughts
in the whispers
I do not hear,
to lull me into thinking
that even breaths
have souls,
that the things we forgot
are the pinpricks of light
when there are
no stars—
and that yes,
lies become truth
when woven with time.
That is why I do not know
why every line I write
backtracks to be you.
You are the footfalls
nearing me, the perfume
and the salt of sweat
I whiff in stagnant air,
the flow in every poem
and every prose
and those abandoned, too.
So I cannot help
but blink & wonder,
if you drown
at the so
Thoughts are lighter than air.
They are what we have
and think we’re missing
because it’s too hard
to go beyond the fact
that they haunt us—
or
‘another reason
for why we can’t
fly.’
But we both know each word
infected with love
has a soul,
a pinprick of light
too blinding &
too clear,
too echoingly hypnotic,
and evanescent.
And the ironic thing is
we remember t
I cut you out
because you were stealing me.
You reached in
and grabbed a fistful of ribs,
spaces and corners
reserved for sleeping
and almost forgetting.
And words,
you took that most of all.
You were a lucid dream
in the hazy sun,
a shade of black
it was almost blue,
the scent in every air
and every niche,
a thought in between thoughts,
the line in poetry
I laid my wish on you
when I got tired of listening
for voices
from a distant star,
but when you threw it away
after you laughed;
not giving me a second thought,
I wasn’t heart-broken.
I expected as much
from the ghost of a lover.
There’s something about the breath of poetry
I can’t quite put;
an unread page,
an unheard note,
a humming
in the most wrong
& the most right
of places,
a soul,
a character,
an air,
a life,
with no birth