if you loved it, leave it behind

She walks across cracked sidewalk
back held straight and mussed up hair
striding through sunlight
ignoring the stares.

flashing green eyes
tell of journeys ahead
of places she's gone
of things that she's said.

but what is this place
she used to call home?
the people are hateful
the city's overgrown

so she tosses her hair
and lengthens her stride
who needs it here
with the cold and the snide?

she reaches the bus stop
it soon will depart
best to get out
while she still has a heart.

the then and now

The lights are a wash of color framing the windowpane, a fluid glow, insistent in the darkness. Chain of light comprised of light itself - it is impossible to sleep with this brilliance in front of me. That glass box of memories is bathed in a faint reflection of color, and the scene changes imperceptibly - a change felt rather than heard or seen, a change sensed because nothing has really changed but my own perception. I see the glass box differently, back when the memories weren't memories, but reality. Then the lights were blue 'round the windowpane; that hypnotic blue glow was an otherwordly luminescence, an allure, a pull, the utter impossibility of unconsciousness. I strain to see it, to feel it as it was then, to slip fully into the recesses of memory, but I am deflected against an invisible barrier, and the whole feeling is fleeting. Just a flicker of memory, a fragment. I look for all the fragments in the hope I can put them all together, join all the pieces, though I know I will always be looking. I stand in a place, immerse myself in years of familiarity, and come up with a single moment in a seemingly past life. Funny these fragments are so easy to relive but so hard to find. Funny they come back to me and it is as if I have known them all along. Strange but so, so beautiful, becoming a part of the place as to unexpectedly fall through it into the transverses of time, into the same place, so long ago, into the makings of a memory.

the line

Standing on the line
dividing warmth and cold
a glowing moon
in darkness alight
it could be a contradiction
I could be a contradiction
on this line
but I'm not.
I am simply -
no, it's something else.
Effervescent
here on the edge of night
I am Effervescent

from the realm of letters

Dear You (well both of you, actually),
I don't know what to tell you, really...there is no right answer, there is no black and white or set in stone. I can't tell you if it'll work, I am helpless to time, I can only listen to the here-and-now and hope that's enough. Muddled dreams and aspirations and lost perception...maybe not lost, but replaced by an unfamiliar void in self, an abyss that falls to the depths of humanity. And that's if you give me the words...otherwise I'm helpless even to listen.
Please, stop beating yourself up. You mean more to me than you'll ever know, far too much for that. No one's perfect, if you were you'd be an abstraction. So if you could kindly cut yourself some slack, you'd be giving someone some peace of mind.
Always,
Chris.

how ironic

you remember how you told me something awhile ago?
it was an insight, a
prediction of sorts.
I didn't think much of it then
in fact if I remember right
I laughed.
wishful thinking
but nevertheless
impossible.

and now
after all this time
who would've known you were right all along?

all to pieces.

and so it takes to the air
an orb of radiance
her glowing thought
manifested
so perfect brilliant unscathed
flaming the color of her copperblonde hair
her idea.

it shimmers around the edges
hanging there
a mirror she offers
gleaming talisman,
the answer you didn't know you
were looking for in the
reflection flashing silver.

I wish I could do that.

but alas
the beauty of silence is broken
shattering her image
as I watch glory fade
collapsing from sheer weight of
those prying words,
brilliant silvers and bronzes dulling
to a charred black.
its misshapen form crumbles
sagging to a pile of ashes
she gathers the withered remains
at her feet
for apparently we must not
stray to abstract lands
while we are here.

From All Angles

tearstains?
salt traces?
or is it something else entirely,
that simple act
of shedding tears?
tearstains—
no, they can be wiped away almost
effortlessly.
but how can one
so nonchalantly
wipe off that smudge on the heart?

it's more the flooding
tears welling up
vision blurring as they escape
from our
deepest reserves of emotion—
for is it not true
the eyes
are window to the soul?