A Poet's Soliloquoy

It’s always the same thing: I sit down in this dank quiet room and take my metallic chemistry striker to the candle to light it’s dancing flame, then I go to the left side of my room and scan the aisles of books for ten minutes, losing myself in the endeavours of creativity. I can't remember if I ever change my routine, always that same two steps and that ballroom dance in the middle of thirty as I draw back my shades and in sapphic revoir speak to my mirror words of romance. My reflection always stares back at me with these hopeless, downtrodden eyes, they’re more purple than the last time I saw them. And that door is the same as it is every day, closed and locked from the inside as I am left alone in my small bubble of my imagination. I'm a poet, I should know how to bring about the best memories or at my fingertips write the best of love, but today I can’t seem to reaffirm how to love myself. So there I go, sitting down at my soggy, dusty desk with it’s stained coating peeling and the lines of the once-great oak slithering away in rapturous tear lines, as if my fingers had dragged and ripped through it at the seams. It’s never enough when I write, my desk overflows with the color of yellowing papyrus and I sit back spacious when it all ends.

To my mouth I bring that black coffee, bitter and sweet as the candlelit flickers and spirals in the distance, bouncing, reverberating across the surface. It’s always the same too: No sweetener, no cream extract nor honey to bring about a special sugary kiss to my lips when the liquid meets them. It’s always bitter, always quiet. Never before do I expect someone to love another like me, and in this time I count the small idle victorian clock that teeters and tots on my desk edge, swathed by the scribbles of ink. I can recall how my hands are littered with pieces of paper cuts and swelling black from how many times I've held the pen wrong, or the charcoal affray. And yet there was still something so warm about receiving what I did, I could feel how my hands slithered and slipped across the small, tiny, wooden carousel-colored box. It had a smooth finish and dainty little flowers growing across it’s forehead, with a singular bronze lock that held golden embroidery leaves around it. The thing smelt like my old grandmother’s house, or at least the home cooked food that came with it, and as I toiled and fiddled with the mechanisms I remembered in my head how it arrived to me, why it arrived to me. One two steps to that door and I pulled it open after my skepticism peered through the peephole, and at my rest was this tiny thing laden at my empty corridor, where doors aplenty spanned from miles and yet not a single soul chirped or sang, no cacophonous boombox or smashing bed frames, no movement of a chair nor bristling of a breeze. It was a daft little thing, like one finding a rock in it’s gardens, and when I opened it unexpectedly to me came that half of a poet’s soul, joined with rips and broken seams itself and adorned in a fine silk with trinkets hugging together. My fingers sifted through each part, how the words refined and connected with other pieces of my own ripped writings, and I remember how lowly my head sunk and cried when finally the piece met its match. To you it read:

My dearest,

Why is it now that our distance is far?

Couldn’t have been, was it true that you had gone?

For many nights I lay in my bed cold without you,

Contemplating that still lifeless pillow besides me.

That moon above the trees and horizons makes me wonder something,

That if it’s truly you writing these and looking back to me.

For days I spend wondering: Will you marry me?

Tempest in our own home, I wish for the day I can kneel to you and speak,

“You, the light of my life, have given so much that my heart aches from how full it is.”

Like my stomach you have filled me with love,

and to this I write so that my canteen is half-full for you again.

Do you remember when I used to write poems for you in this room? How we would dance together in that synchronized pattern, one two three, again. Our feet moved, sung as we allowed these hallways to be filled with our syphoning orchestras, and oh how we cherished one another before us? How is it now that I am alone, you were that door across from me, that audience, that world.

I was very young when I met you: We rode those tricolored bikes down that shoddy highway as the dust bunnies and tumbleweeds bounced lackadaisy in the background. I remember how pretty you said the skies were, yet you jest for a subtle moment to pick a rock out of your knee because we had lain down our heads into our own disastrous crash against those pieces of measly gravel. How sweet your laugh was and that sticky bun and your browned hair, how it tangled and rolled in between the silhouetted shadows and cracks in the flooring. Sometimes I thought that these pieces of hair stretched down into the basement and could coil like snakes around objects a’plenty.