Maybe I’ll Stop Writing In The Spring

Maybe I’ll stop writing in the spring.

Maybe by that time my heart will be completely healed.

The words that flow like blood from an open wound will be clotted and begin the process by which new life will begin.

I can take my aching fingers, massage the pain they have suffered from writing so many times about her silky hair, her fathomless eyes, her tender skin, her magical body, all of which have given me endless wonderful memories and, simultaneously, given painful nightmares of memory for losing her… and they will never pick up pen to write of her from that day forward.

To rest my mind of superlatives and synonyms, describing what she encases as if a Pandora’s Box that begs opening yet threatens cataclysms to surely end all things once it is done… what hallelujahs will be sung in joy at that moment.

And then to open my eyes anew, as if seeing the sky for the very first time in all its swirling menagerie of colors, whereas she was my sky; to breathe in the fresh open meadows and beautiful spring flowers and crisp clean air as if breathing my first, whereas she was my breath.

To be released from this prison of paper and prose; never again to suffer the ignobility of having died a million deaths – never small but guttural and harsh in their finality, flesh rent and stripped away clean, my heart beating its last inky thrum so as to surrender words to her cause….

And yet here I am… writing of her again.

Begging her touch one last time.

Seeking her peace in my soul once more.

Trying and failing to explain in a few fumbling, foolish phrases and similes what she means to me.

It’s never any use. She never reads me. She has a life which begs other things of her.

I understand. I really do.

Just don’t ask me to like it.

Because my withered soul will ache forever, then beyond forever, and a few days beyond that.

Maybe I’ll stop writing in the spring.

Then again, maybe I won’t.

Yet I may still.

It depends on how much blood is left to write in my heart. Or how little.

Or the trickling stream may become a raging ocean yet again, coursing as a nor’easter to her waiting shore.

My god, why do I write so passionately for a woman who will never see my words, who will never know my heart?

Maybe I’ll stop writing in the spring.

Maybe it’s for the best.

Maybe I should have stopped a long time ago.

Maybe I’ll close my eyes and dream of her again.

Maybe in my dreams I’ll hear her whisper, “Please, my poet, write for me again….”

Then, without a thought, I will.

Because I have before.

And will again.

I am such a fool.

Which is why the cell will remain opened, but I will stay here, imprisoned forever.

Shackled, bleeding, writing still.

Maybe I’ll stop writing in the spring.

But we both know I won’t.

And so does she.