Is that Christmas falling in your hair?
I can taste your past lover’s countdown kiss,
I can smell the coming year;
it smells like this.
I drink this season’s red wine serenade;
drunken romance is bliss.
Your light spots me through falling feathers and snow;
the instruments pick themselves up, tangle,
reminisce; the songs say they don’t know.
Lyrics stumble over mosaics of words,
dancers turn the room on its heels
and spin the lights like sweeping beams.
I don’t know how celebration feels.
I don’t know what it means.
I’m asleep, unseen, beneath your rotting tree,
waking up to one year ago
when I am no longer me,
in love with a shadow’s light-less face,
once breathing, now bereaving,
once sculpted in alabaster grace.
I turn around and my legs are leaving.
Is that Romeo and Juliet on the stairs?
Is that stardust in their cartoon hair?
Ghosts, they are everywhere,
reciting holy verse from last year’s nightmare,
dancing out an ancient scene, screaming verse in
fevered dreams; the scars bleed like new,
weeping wounds recall me to you.
Are they flowers smiling on that grave?
All the lonely people that could not be saved…
let’s honour the falling year,
to all the ones who could not be here,
their ink-less veins and faceless names;
let’s take another shot,
the world forgetting by the world forgot,
let’s sing a prayer and disappear like smoke…
Is that home on the horizon?
Washed in darkness s so absolute
I only see it with my eyes closed
and my heart wide open.
Is that poetry frozen mid-rhyme on your lips?
Your tongue tells it as such,
when I once believed it as much,
the faith I once found in your kiss.
Is that hope swimming in your eyes?
I thought I heard your pulse tell lies.
You are my secret regret;
my only unpaid debt.
Confession.
And then the future comes down like an
execution.
Copyright ©: Shaunna Harper
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
