By Kaitlyn Karol
The imprints of an invisible world remain
a mystery where the sun was kidnapped by the rain…
where lazy, chipped stairs never led to any higher plain,
where only broken, theft-shattered windows and spider webs are maintained.
Isolated,
Paralyzed,
Violated,
Controlled,
Haunted.
My heart - heavy, burdened and ill,
held
in a prison, against its will.
At your gun’s point,
but it’s full of blanks, so quiet and still…
Admired, then abandoned and betrayed,
future sacred sacrament of love
sacrificed and permanently delayed,
your ambivalent amours,
naked, open, humming sensation with
silent ambition.
Tenderness so recoiled,
so alive with a red-flaming passion,
then suddenly, so dead and spooky-spinely black,
calling me to go back,
to a time now no longer in fashion,
to a time I’ve tried to run from and forget
and relish later to wonder if I regret.
As dark and stained as dried blood,Â
two hearts with all the right beats and notes struggling to express
lyrical intent contained by a dam
without a proper flood...
Our collusion,
and its potential power with so much music
but no sound,
best-kept secret
oppressed and hidden under ground,
like a forgotten gift of family treasure,
beneath the worn and floor-buckling woodworks
and crumbling structure of an uninhabited home's
shaky, yet stable and inhibited good quirks,
a redeemable character,
and charm still worthy of being unlocked
like the kind buried in the planks of
a nostalgic juke box,
so weak, yet so strong, so right yet so wrong,
spinning some sad old Patsy Cline song.
At first sight, your love, some strange bliss -
or do I deign to even call it this?
Overly-composed, stubbornly satin-smooth
like a catatonic schizophrenic
that refuses to move,
that knows not how to cope,
sinister in its childish false hope...
ghosted and ghost-slapped,
freeze-dried and heat-wrapped...
wo, no, my hate of such fate,
before it sizzled
it fizzled - a warm glove with no mate,
a slow burn that curled over from being singed and deep-fried,
like an overworked hearth, the signs of its waste, wrangled and wry,
too much fire bears the soot on your hands, yet you didn't even try
to clean the fire and poke the ashes --
no trough for no tears, no cry
for no lashes,
no sentence beyond the ellipsis and the dashes -
untold truth but not knowing the fullness of the lie -
though a noble honesty without any clever reasons why...
so we stay where we are,
locked inside the limbo of the eerily bizarre,
with old rickety doors
that kept being slammed,
and cracked ajar,
half-open yet crammed,
half of some closed invitation,
a cross uncrossed threshold so near, yet so far.
Echoes down a narrow winding cooridor:
a voice still calling to me from a cold, foggy room,
and when I go to find it,
it fades without proof, like a flower's seeds
that won't bloom,
or a miscarried infant
never delivered from a womb.
This makes a liar out of my frown
for this story misses its many pages, has no cover for its crown -
so I hide the blank chapters that could have been written
with a careful,tactful smile,
for a title that reads, 'too much touch and no tactile'.
Many years later, I turn back to look at your old photo
and you aged young just as I knew -
like a macabre mansion too high on a hill with
ravens on the rooftop that never flew,
still distant, still half there,
as my heart, like your eyes - flutters in despair -
the stunning and stunted color of blue
fighting back the vibrant memory which really
held no hue.
Was this just another gaslit tale of much ado about nothing,
or too much of a well-scripted thriller
minus the right, brave-enough director -
an overkill of too much kind of something?
Who knows, maybe both, I may never know -
but what all I do have left to show
sits in an empty, cruel picture frame,
staring back at me in an ancient time freeze-framed
only outlined by silly tacit blame-games,
where the heart shall forever
remain
unclaimed and
haunted.