throwback: 2002: fata morgana

She less-than-knew me,
Truly;
Who I was in the cold
Or who I,
By a rarer warmth amidst it,
Wished to be:
She was deaf
To a story untold;
Dismissed it,
Chained to an old
And rasping melody.
Her malady
As much mine
Half-curtainly;
But I loved
Her too certainly to see it.
So be it:
As blooms vine-vanquished,
Anxiously spillt as overnight wine,
Time escapes us,
Time trips and scrapes us—
As do chances,
Glances with apology,
And love.
With careful glove do I turn
Such brittle, acid-leached pages,
The burn of age
At their dog-eared edges,
Creeping open my catacomb of hows
And vacated pledges,
All the sacred cows
Of a heart’s
Slow-emotioned,
Photo-collaged miscarriages—
‘Tis a corkscrew
Impiercing me to perceive
Love’s as worthless a treaty
As any war!
But, by grace, that feeling’s fleeting,
And I come back to it less than more,
Too-sure of it, still-needing:
Peace is, if weepingly,
Worth it,
Though digging’s as hard to unearth it
As soiling it is easy.
O, but Sol traces the silhouette
Of a blushing serendipity—
And a blind-white tent
In the desert,
By a someday-lake lapping torridly?
While the grey pays later the rent
On the when, why and way
She was,
For just a moment, meant
To go along and astray
With me.