my muse speaks to me in an invisible tongue,

her words melting with my imagination;

her hair, her laugh, her fingers

are all dancing in my head,

playing with my foolish conscience.

her wholeness! her clothes! her lime converse shoes and marble green ring!

her happy locks; her round, crystal glasses—

all images I cannot escape, mirages frequenting my mind

her voice rings in my ears,

jingling like a sweet chime;

her beautiful blue nails all rising and falling

in a fantastical dance

choreographed from her fine fingers.

still—her heart, she claims, was never mine to behold.

and when her mouth shifts,

her lips locating the foreign flavor,

coated in the nostalgia of “home,”

whispering—

whispering to me(!), and me alone(!!)—

whispers in the wind

they call me,

flirting with my feverishly faint feeling;

pulling, plucking, snapping at my heartstrings—

wrestling me away from bed ‘till dawn’s early hours

(yet always weighing in my mind in the dark)—

feeding off my overbearingly fond responses—

my harsh, brittle cackle

running up against her silky, honey laugh

that coaxes me, lulls me

away to a tenderest, wholesome retreat

lost in a forgotten corner of my sorry soul.

What did it all mean?

a 5 am night; eighteen hours straight spent on some

old, black leather couch.

her leg presses against mine.

I could’ve sworn I saw her head collapse in on me;

fleeing at first

to the shifting of mine,

but gradually accepting.

I watched her sleep, so still, unmoving.

so there too I shall remain.

What else could it have meant?

thousands of messages

ferryed across the late night,

deep into the dawn.

meanders begun at midnight,

only glumly and grudgingly terminated

by four.

the thought of her lips spelling out my name,

the thought of her mind interlaced with mine through midnight—
“I don’t want to give you false hope...”

I don’t believe in “hopeless romanticism,”

because I believe there is always hope to be found.

if only we stopped searching,

and started waiting.

(“patience… is a virtue”)

And in such cases,

hopelessness is not so much for romance,

as it is for the lust for love and emotion.

But hope is heavy—burdensome, even—

when laden on one pair of shoulders.

so this is where I stay.

this is not a love poem. it cannot be, for I am just one;

a single lit streetlamp

in a slick, rained-out evening.

“I like you a lot as a person,”

so it should be nothing more.

—be still, my crooked, clichéd in clinging heart;

here is a fresh scab not to be picked at—

for this love is yours to keep,

but not yours to share.