Red Ink

Just let me breathe the past in one more time
to taste the sweetness of its air, remembering the things
that once were, now drift away like breaking clouds
now swept along the shoreline of the forgotten
now the painter’s color brushed on surfaces of neglect
while you, artist
create a masterpiece of denial.

Longing to retrace the steps we took,
I glance the only way I’ve ever known,
now caught inside this cage of something I fear
will hold me far too tight for even keys of coming
chances to unlock, cannot break free
and I gaze again through bars made up of
reasons why I could not reach the only dream
written on my heart in lasting red ink
I cannot erase.

The paper is creased a thousand times over the
words that begged to come from my mouth, begged
to know the feeling of voice and the
sound of their own meaning from the lips of one
who feared them the most, and who
fought to never set them free from their enslavement
to myself, as long as they were mine
as long as they were children of my pen, as long
as I could hold them dear in my hands, because they
would, I know, become earth’s prey.

Just let me remember
how the footsteps on this broken path were made
and what the callouses on my weary hands
signified- the soil of mortal life and predestined dreams which
ran between my fingers, slipping away like hourglass sand
like time
like my love for everything that, to you,
never existed.