We are captured in a trap of soul clenching quiet.

The capsule of our thoughts enclosed.

Temperamental love we have bound by a reclusively that no one else could ever suppose.

This love of ours is not for the weak of heart.

We deem all incandescent perfection but that's only in its imaginary parts.

In our every move we break each other's hearts.

No part of us is hidden, in each other's eyes our very flesh remains exposed.

And I know we must learn to let go.

But it's seems that would be like giving the death blow.

I tell myself that you can't be my only one.

But with lover's I've never been overrun.

I say the world is full of soul mates.

Each one just finds another part of your soul to cling to, at any rate.

I convince myself that the heart is a muscle.

with pieces to be put back together like a puzzle.

And once it loves it can never stop.

It's lover's remains forever in it's vault.

once it breaks it grows back stronger.

With each tear it learns to faithful stay longer.

Broken bones still shift.

They still feel.

Even when lovers, are adrift.

Love it cannot conceal.

I separate heart and mind.

The only hinderance of love is ever lost in the mind, that's the problem with humankind.

But what is a heart without a soul?

It's just something that beats.

Something squeezing, and struggling.

I'm lost in this lovesickness black hole.

I've tried to back space our story, I hold the button to delete.

These emotions I juggle.

My mind reasons with me, tells all the logic.

But the love that runs through my veins is toxic.

And I can't let you go.

Another lover I've attempted to borrow.

But see my heart and mind is forever connected.

All other lovers I've rejected.

Despite you breaking me over and over another lover I will never have.

There may be a world of soul mates.

But I have but one soul.

I’ve searched for loopholes.

But to you I must confess my heart will always belong.

I think we’ve know it all along.

So break me, torture me set my soul of fire

Despite it all i am yours and you are mine.

You’ve possessed me and the possession has spread within me like a wildfire.

One day we will give up the fight and give ourselves to each-other

recognizing the day our souls connected we were forever intertwined.

My back towards the earth, my belly towards the sky.

I would dream of the day's beyond the black sunrise.

The times when the rules and standards of man I'd no longer comply.

Times where for guidance I'd look to the butterflies.

If I knew that beyond that black sunrise was a world without limits, oh the things I would do.

Hidden in this cocoon; no longer would I stay.

From this safety net I would breakthrough.

These wings I'd no longer peel back.

The colors I'd set on display.

I would no longer be scared to fly away.

I'd dance in the field's of Lillies.

Drink from the lips of daisies.

Luxuriate in the ream's of the euphoric underworld.

Kiss the one I love.

If there was ever any safety in it, how I might fly.

I'd spring off of the rooftops of Shanghai.

Just to remember how falling into you felt.

But, alas my belly pointed towards the sky; eyes beyond the horizon I could sense my future beyond it.

Only I didn't know what.

I hold my own hand too afraid that if I reach out for yours; that on the morrow the wails of our love will silence, and it will birth only a stillborn.

For even in limitless forever there are limits.

Even in that euphoric underworld there are demon's.

And in the fields of Lillies there are thorns.

Even in the sweetness of daisies there is bitterness.

And within the limits when I kiss the one I love I'm met with spiked barbed wire.

For either way there was never any safety in it.

I wish we were butterflies.

For if we knew what little time we had maybe safety wouldn't matter.

If we knew this summer was all we had, would that be close enough to limitless?

But we aren't butterflies.

70 summers we've been allotted.

70 summers for us to say, next time.

70 summers for fear to overtake us.

Time the greatest blessing, the worst curse.

The thing that sets us apart.

I wish we were butterflies.

If I knew there was a time frame before the light in our world died out.

I would pirouette over the stones.

I would taste only the sweetness in the bitterness of the daisies.

I would have kissed you between the spiked barbed wire.

We are not butterflies though.

So at arm's length I hold you.

Hoping that between now and one of the 70 summers we live that we might live beyond the limits.

Hoping just to stay close to you between that time.

For 70 summers without you is a curse no spell could break.

It's an ending I could never take.

It's a stillborn that my life I'd give to resuscitate.

And so I will catch a thousand butterflies, and hold them in clear jars.

I'll keep them close as I watch the stars.

Learning forever from lives.

Until the day that my metamorphosis is complete.

Then I'll give myself to you throwing away my fears proving our love ever elite.

I am stubborn in my love for you.

Pig-headed in my adoration for you through and through.

It's too early to queue my feelings.

Too early to inscribe our names on the sistine chapel cellings.

These days now, I crave the secret identity of us, the anonymity.

I've tried to look at you injudiciously.

But rose-colored glasses; to my eyes are glued.

Our heartbeats already sing in harmony.

Is this how love is supposed to feel?

Like my head is lost in the pink clouds of sobriety?

Like I am falling from the heavens luxuriating in the lack of air, in the crashing of my lungs?

In the sinking feeling of falling?

Is this how love is supposed to feel?

Is it not too early to call it love?

But isn't this all what it is symptomatic of?

If it isn't love I don't know what this is.

One day maybe I will see it was all a mistake.

I'll learn to accept the heartache.

But I've only kept thinking what if, mistake this is not.

And in five or ten years, what if I cannot recognize myself without you.

Perhaps this love doesn't die off.

Forever I would hate myself for ever doubting in you, in us.

If this ends in heartache I won't be angry.

Not blankly.

No matter how we end in five days or fifty-five years, my heart deserves some type of accolade.

Because you were the first to my heart evade.

The first to explore the trenches of my soul, in this strange love, crusade.

To search through worlds and places forbade.

I've always wondered who would be the first.

Who would see me, beyond my worst.

Despite my invisible being.

Now I have a name.

And I believe that nothing can ever be the same.

For that alone he should receive some sort of prize.

For love, he humanized.

If only for this very moment he has become my muse.

He awakened the butterflies.

One I believed my soul to devoid of.

Is this how love is supposed to feel?

Shaky legs and racing heart I falter on this balance-wheel.

I no longer own this mechanical beating in my chest.

You have come in the night and my heart you have burglarized.

All of this I can no longer protest.

Hold it in like medicine.

Hold the truth in, like after ten seconds the lies will dissolve on your tongue.

Like it’ll cure realities, burdens.

Like it’ll open your eyes and turn lies to truth's.

Like it’ll purge your sicknesses exposing your sins through the very glands of your skin.

Hold it in like medicine.

Let the sweat coat your warm body as your fever shakes you to your very core.

The sickness within in you seems incurable.

You can't see straight.

Your vision is blurry.

Your truth as shaky and lose as what come's forth from your mouth.

But hold it in like medicine.

No one wants to know the truth, not really.

Keep it close to your heart.

Swallow the cherry tasting liquor until it's bitterness turns sweet.

The truth, bury it.

When the sickness is over your words will be sweet.

The sweet nothing's that I've only ever begged you to speak.

Your lies I can take.

But the truth I'm allergic to.

Your truth's spill hives on my skin.

Your reality sets my skin on fire.

Send's my heart into arrest.

Tell me your sweet lies.

Hold back your truths until your lies I believe.

Until your lies turn to realities.

Tell me lies, for your honesty threatens to be the demise of me.

Tell me your stories, I won't question it.

Tell me you love me.

Hold back your hate.

Hold back your heart.

Hold it all back.

Sip on the medicine of lies; temporary cure it is.

For your sickness will forever spread.

Your sickness will forever rot both our hearts.

Drink back your medicine and cough up stories coated with the cold of your soul.

He says tell me about your writing?

I think to myself that he's asking for a piece of my soul the key to a secret treasure box that's been hidden away. But as the laminated menus create a barrier between us, and he sips the fizzy cherry cola in the dim lights of this quiet restaurant, I think to myself that I kind of like this guy. I almost feel like he should know pieces of me that no one else does. And so as if I've grabbed the steak knife that sits between us I prepare to spill my secrets like guts.

Even before I speak his eyes seem to tell me that I could say anything to him, and it's be safe in his arms.

I take a breath and fiddle with the hand-held device in my pocket most people use it for snapping pictures of mediocre meals, catching moments in time, scrolling listlessly through photos of other people's lives, mindless conversation. But not me. What lives behind the screen in secrets notes are stories of lives unseen.

His question chants in my ear, and I wonder if when I tell him my story if he'll become my apostle, my follower, my first and only fan, a believer in the passion I call my works.

My writing.

Well I wouldn't say that I have the talent of Shakespeare or anything like that. Who would? He was a God. I bow to his accomplishments. Funny thing is I don't think I could compare myself to any writer of old. Not Brontee, or lord Byron, Robert frost, or even Edgar Allen Poe. And maybe that's because I have an odd case of imposter syndrome. I've spent years looking for a cure but there's been not breakthrough's. Or perhaps it's because I'm in a class of my own. In a wilderness all alone. Not because I'm something special, mostly because I'm a writer lost in a sea of better poets. A wildflower in a field of roses.

I think my writing belongs not to one genre.

Because who could ever describe themselves as one thing?

I think of all the melancholy madness of mess I scribble on old scraps of paper if to one category it must be owned to it might be called almost romantic. Not tragic enough to be called depressing, not funny enough to be seen as comedic, not loving enough to be called heart-warming. The poem's I write are melodies with highs and low and sympathetically written rhymes.

Describe my writing?

I'd say it was crash in a ballet.

A bouquet of dead flowers. Once beautiful, once something that was almost perfect. I think if there were two words that I'd have to describe my writing with it would be Melancholy Mess. Yes that's exactly how I'd describe it.

I look up and the cherry cola that fizzed is empty, nothing but ice left in it's place. The booth in front of me is empty. My date has disappeared. I suppose I could have said something simple instead of this rant. Then maybe he might have stayed. He could have been the one, I shrug who finds true love online dating anyway. Call me old fashion but there's something desperate about swiping right. When I'd done it myself I'd been desperate.

This was how it always went. Guys wanted normal girls. Girls who paint there nails red, and sing along to Taylor swift, calling her the greatest writer to have ever lived. Guys want girls who dream of white picket fences, and whose pin interest boards are lined with their imaginary wedding days.

I'm slowly learning that guys don't want girls fueled by their own webbed thoughts. Who thrust themselves into depressive lows, because,'that's when writing gets good.'

They don't want girls who stick their nose up to Taylor swift and only know the songs of unrated bands with deep voices and sad notes.

He could have been the one, for someone just not for me.

I wanted to fall in love tonight, and I almost did. He could have become my love-story muse. But instead he'll be my heartbreak muse. Just like all the others. The new inspiration to my arts. Another dead flower to be tucked into the bouquet of others. I lean into the corner of the booth, and wave over the waiter. I order a cherry cola for myself, something to eat and shoo her away. I lean into the booth, listening to the sound of the fizzing in my ear. I let the dim light's of the restaurant cover me. My thumbs slide against the screen of my phone, the one with notes hidden in different pathways. And I think to myself here goes another Melancholy Melody.

My favorite genre.

Self-isolation's a term that we’ve gotten used to in 2020

Stay away, stay home, stay stay, stay alone.

But the fact of the matter is that I’ve been self-isolating long before I was grown.

Tears on my pillowcase, teardrops on the bathroom floor, I’ve long known what it was like to be alone.

This doesn’t feel like anything new, somehow living through a pandemic feels like something I’ve already been through.

Lonely nights, the sound of your voice echoing through the house hasn’t been anything anew.

The next day you pretending, like I was ignorant, like the cover of the night covered your sins.

You’ve been my pandemic my whole life, you’ve cut me off from the outside world, and though I’ve tried to run with every sprint with every attempt you cut my limbs.

Self-isolate.

Stay at home.

It’s always been your way.

We could never stray.

Self-isolate

Stay at home

You’ve taken away my options.

Dear God, you are nothing but a toxin.

Pandemic's new for this century.

For me, it’s nothing but an old memory.

Phony lies telling me it’s safe outside.

But in reality, all it is is a graveside on a hillside on the eastside where in the end we all go topside.

See you think I’m weak and you can silence me with your disease.

But I will never let you preside.

You will never see my tears on the roadside, or cuts that I scrap by the bedside.

You will never know what you’ve done to me because if you know you affected me then that means I let you get to me.

You will ever only see my strong side with the phony smile and bright jides.

You will never see the way I cried or the parts of me that I’ve killed and left on the roadside, for vultures to divide and the cars to collide.

You will never know my contrite for you.

All I will ever do is be polite, never forthright with you.

See Ill I brush my teeth with the fluoride looking all bright with a cheesy chide to you.

But the truth is I’m only waiting for an off night with a landslide by the seaside with riptide to take you, in the night.

And when I'll watch you try to swim ashore with more empty promises for another chance to make things right and for another chance of a rewrite.

I will look at you and I will stamp denied.

Only then will I be able to collect the tears that I shed by daylight and grab the rawhide of my body parts and then after you are long gone ill set a fire and ignite them by the hearthside.

You my, pandemic will be gone, no part of you will be implied, then maybe I’ll take a joyride to your graveside with an invite.

Telling you to watch from below how I turned out alright.

I find my soul is a wandered beast.

Roaming the transatlantic beach.

To this world my soul is not possessed.

Of that I know I haven’t been blessed.

This life is only a contract, to which I long ago breeched.

I’ve willed my lover to come take me.

His soul, like mine a ghostly remnant of a human love, left behind.

A soliloquy of a man, who to earth was never apart.

Wandered beast I am.

He a god, like a lover from greek mythology.

Our love, nothing ever was written about it, so commonly.

These places where my spirit has gone to rest.

Have only ever been in my own self interest.

But like the great God Thetis, my soul you own; to your own control.

Your dreams, the very beatings to my heart and soul.

To earth my soul is not possessed.

I only now know that after your death.

Our love a tragedy, like the story told through Macbeth.

My soul a ghost; I have no place but in the hidden shadows of walls defaced.

My life a memory of a time displaced.

The world I see, I do not believe, that it can be.

For I am an on-looker I fail to partake.

As I lay restless in wake.

Wandered beast I’ve been.

Searching for your soul beyond the cliffs.

And the perfect taste of smoothed-lined lips.

The weightlessness of your body; something like a once in a lifetime eclipse.

I watch this world from a distance.

Refusing to love.

Refusing to hate.

Refusing to stay.

My roots are no where; in this life I call foul play.

The soul called my temple, lies inoperable on display.

A story that will never be portrayed.

Wandered child I am without a home or place.

For when the time is right and when I can no longer be an outcast.

And my life has been a dead hand to the past.

I float the transatlantic beach.

My lover will not be far out of reach.

I will call him to life.

Lose myself to the sheath knife.

And then he will deem me his wife.

Wandered beast I will be no more.

Together we will take the final flight.

For then it will only feel right.

To the earth I will say goodnight.

And to you forever I will hold tight.

What is goddess with no god.

A queen with no king.

A poet with no muse.

A soul without life.

A leaf without flower.

You are spring.

With you I can deal with a world of strife.

Your love, a great power.

The only thing worth worshiping.

My own soliloquy still hidden beneath my fingertips.

But the one we write together is already etched on very breast’s.

To you I give my soul.

And I am unafraid of my life within your hands.

For I know in the end, where, together in our love our story lands.

But for now wandered soul I stay.

Searching for my muse, my king, my soul, my flower.

In this troubled world I’ll remain.

Outcasted to a world, my heart has already defamed.

This be the soliloquy of the beast of a wandered soul.

Of a Poet without a muse.

A soul searching for a life.

To life I’ve been burdened to stay until, unburdened to this life I shall proclaim.

I walk this transatlantic beaches partaking in life at only a distance.

Ready to throw myself to your feet and worship the story that’s already been written for the love we’ve so long tried to tame.

She'll crawl in bed before the sunsets.

Alone, withdrawn from her thoughts.

Replaying her lover's promises to herself like threats.

Recalling highlights of his love in golden hour screenshots.

Her heart feels fragile.

She can see pieces of her soul scattered on her bedside table.

A mirror set just so, to watch herself unravel.

She knows the migration of their hearts was interglacial.

She mindlessly flips the channel.

She know this too shall pass.

Because the reality is that if love doesn't last forever neither will heartbreak.

Those scattered pieces of her heart she'll sweep up like shattered glass.

She'll wonder if heartbreak is as easy to cure as a belly ache.

if the memory of him is as easy to erase as those screen shots.

And if this was her entire story of merely a subplot.

The older she gets she'll see that life is a strange place.

And that nothing is black and white rather it's all a four-dimensional space.

The thing that broke her, will now shape her.

Her heart, her greatest saboteur.

This too shall pass.

Like the clear sunny days that come after the rain.

Like the clarity that comes after drowning herself in her wineglass.

nothing last forever.

not even the worst of days,

Or the greatest of pleasures.

And while she feels like hope is just a catchphrase.

Deep down she knows the truth.

So for now she'll take one ticket for depression at the ticket booth.

What's to worry if it doesn't last forever?

What's to fear if it's just a temporary relapse?

She just needs a moment to grieve her broken heart.

She won't go too far.

She's too smart, even if her thoughts are sometimes like a piece of abstract art.

She can't fully fall apart.

What's the harm in standing under cold droplets of rain.

She doesn't believe it's inhumane.

It's nothing like stepping in front of a freight train.

The rain always ends.

She's just crying alongside it.

For if she smiles she'd be deemed a hypocrite.

But when it's over, she'll smile, to life she'll recommit.