The Hope Of Midnight

Sinking, drowning, and drinking up

The murky waters left in your wake.

Deliciously poisoned apples bobbing on the waves

Of a terrified, retreating summer

Fill a belly starved to nonexistence.

It cramps and seizes the way my crippled heart did

When the icy water surrounded this broken body,

When you threw me overboard.

*********************************

The world is still.

*********************************

In the stillness, your absence is a trumpet.

Blaring defeat, screaming the story of my failures

It wobbles through the water

Reaching me when it has distorted into a garbled,

“I never needed you, not even for a moment.”

And when the music stopped, the whispers remained,

Haunting me in the shifting darkness of the deep,

My final resting place.

*********************************

I am lost to the sea.

*********************************

The whispers have turned to cement.

Twining around my ankles, swimming between my toes

They solidified and dragged me deeper while my old friend,

The heart caged in my chest,

Burst through my bones, floating, floating,

Floating towards the glittering white sun

Littering the sea like the unshed tears in my eyes.

*********************************

My heart traveled where my body could not.

*********************************

It rose higher and higher, catching each current

With startling precision while I floundered.

Water drowned the roses in my lungs,

Pressure popped the dreams cluttering my mind.

Bones stomped on and crushed by the trumpet

Flailed in a pathetic attempt to reach my ascending heart

Before it hit the salty sea air and burst

From the toxic composition of reality.

*********************************

Hope can only live below the surface.

*********************************

I could not catch it.

Not as my eyes darkened from the depths.

Not ast the last rays of sun illuminated the red organ

Rising higher with that intoxicating hope.

It was too close for comfort,

Somehow too far away to ever be caught despite

The soft feel of it beneath my fingertips.

*********************************

I watched it go.

*********************************

The ghost of a smile haunted my lips

And the cherry blossom remnants on my cheeks

Illuminated the bleak, black waters pink.

The final blob of sunlight had gone weak,

Shifting into an alabaster white that caressed

Every dark crevice, sang in my blood, and pulled

The scared, reclusive animals from their holes.

*********************************

I let her go.

*********************************

“Goodbye, my heart,” I whispered, a cloud of bubbles

Lifting from my lips and crackling on the surface.

“And good luck.”

The moon carried her away cradled in its hands, the tides,

Just as my feet tapped against the sandy floor.

I could see her there, twinkling in the moonlight

As it leaned in low and kissed her broken chambers.

*********************************

The world is finally still.

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