Tracing these feelings back
Wondering where you began to care
Why did you lose your resolve
& fall in love in the summer’s glare
A palm grove as a backdrop
Kissing quietly behind the reeds
Feeling more than you had expected
Unsure of the coming needs
Layers of sand now everywhere
Breeze feeling cool upon your bare hips
Hopeful surprises found refreshing
Nothing less than passion upon your lips
Disturbed themes & distant thrombosis
A hitch in your giddy-up when it’s time for tea
Transcendental visitations
From dreams may come answers to our makeshift reality
Pouring over the brackish tomes with devotion
Gentlemen & ladies of letters; luminaries of thought
But truth doesn’t cure our limited capacities
Bare harbingers of the illiterations we’ve wrought
We’ve taken ill in our posh-marked libraries
Leaving fingerprints on memories we loved the most
We maunder through our raging debates
Knowing full well they’re all books about ghosts
Darkness creeps in on our musty resolve
Syntax prescribed with an utmost surgical query
Descending by the light of our candelabra
If we survive, we’ll be counted amidst the weary
Quiet practice of language
Where saints lay desecrated
Discarded words & their meanings
Grizzled by dreams we’ve created
Continuing on is our only option
In spite of our demon’s desires
Internal resolve beats steadily
Rising once more; trial by fire
Don’t tell them the bad things
For they’ll never understand
Unfair portraits of emotion
Feeling adrift & wholly damned
Hopelessness internalized
It is a matter for us to resolve
Into the trenches to survive
With only love to absolve
Captain Q 