What historic shadows do we live with?
What bricked, mortared, and hole-riddled, but still beating heart will we keep saying suffices?
What love? What?
This battered banner
These stars
Ready now, to tell true stories
Able, finally
To let go
To grow

What historic shadows do we live with?
What bricked, mortared, and hole-riddled, but still beating heart will we keep saying suffices?
What love? What?
This battered banner
These stars
Ready now, to tell true stories
Able, finally
To let go
To grow
She is streamers
She is stars
She is the red that sustains Mars
Bars don’t exist
On her heart
She is steadfast
She is dangling
She is silver-Mediterranean
Alien and best friend
Alike
She is words
She is breath
She is life seducing death
Express your intent
So to stay
She is present
She is feathers
She is coppery hot weather
Whether you like that
Or not
I know this night
Allow me to define
Temperature just right
Songbirds dancing in the dusk
A perfect ambiance
I know this night well, I say!
Yet still unready to admit
The aloneness of it
The how I see clearly
The what that she has that I should have
Trepidation as stars begin their show
Is all the what that I have
My big, demure eyes
My young, smooth skin
I’d trade her for her treasure
Then maybe in the mirror see
Somebody you love
I took all the light in lieu
A select vessel
And with these, vanished to a sunnier place on high
I didn’t ask
Though it still pains me that no one put up a fight
There is more East now than ever before
Here, the Sunflowers turn their faces skyward
Earth and stars seem everywhere
The May-blooming Magnolia disappeared with me, too
Gracious, though
I left a single torch and White Tulips
For my shadow, who remains there, sometimes
there is no Noah-gene abounding of me
no spin of the wheel offering another lifespan allowance equal to what you’ve long since spent
in silence, find truth
there is no infinite number of star-filled skies
no take-backs or do-overs, despite my shouts of forgiveness and this miracle heart transplant
in truth, find silence