The ballad of the perfect Romance.

He was looking for another cause, something else that could be saved.
He was sitting under the twisted tree that grew beside the lake.
The twisted tree was company, and he told it what he craved.
And the sky was full of tangerines that hung upside down.

He was sitting there when she found him, she sang her siren song.
She told him he could be brave, now that she was there to be strong.
He told her to paint him on a canvas, so he’d remember just what he was.
He asked her to preserve this reality in her jar of cobweb silk.

Then the sun was in their eyes, and then it drifted away to the right,
They held each other as the day died, and as time was reborn as night.
The stars came out as hard little points, and hunkered down against the light.
And fires burnt on the horizon, where the others waited.

She was crying one day when he came to her, and he would not ask her why.
She cried into his shoulder, she sobbed for hours, and then she let her tears dry.
He knew he should have asked her why she had been crying.
She smiled at him, and she said, Thank you, for knowing not to ask.

He was writing symphonies in the street, and they saw, and ran to get her.
He is mad, they said, he is lying in the road, go to him, make him better.
She smiled, he won’t listen, she said, he is free, he doesn’t understand fetters.
She wouldn’t go, he has the soul of a poet, she told them all.

She never tried to reform him, she would never try to own his mind.
And he never tried to shield her, from truth, from life, or from the blind.
They were together until they were parted, and that was when they died.
And turtle doves bled feathers over their pyres.

The smoke rose high.

I want time to stop.

I want order. And quiet.

And long, cool draughts of rest, to fill my soul.

And long, quiet conversations where I do not need to be charming.

And days where I do not have to be intelligent.

And evenings with my feet up, reading.

I do not want to pace this bridge anymore.

I want everything to stop. Now.

I want to live here.

And I want this moment to be everywhen.

I see a thousand shades rise up out of the dark. They tell me that no single thing abides, and that all things must flow. Who was it that said that? Lucretius? I forget.

Everything flows away.

Away into the dark that houses the past, where the smell of sacred incense blends with the stench of dead intentions, with the sustaining odor of past triumphs, with the tang of happy promises and every so often, with an elusive whiff of forlorn regret.

Before I became a not very pompous young man, I used to be an extremely pompous boy. I wrote horribly. Verbosely. Pompously.

I wrote this poem in the space of fifteen minutes as part of a creative writing competition for a fest that I went to.

This is one of the very few love poems I have written, and it is one amongst those of my own poems I least like. However it did win me the first prize, and I like the way I arranged the poem in three line stanzas.

I am putting this up to show one person who agonizes about her own writing, one of the follies that litter the landscape of my own creative efforts.

Before you read it, remember to not judge me too harshly. I was young. And foolish. And had a crush on a girl I thought I’d never see again.

Ah. Youth.

The topic they gave us was, “Love Among the Ruins.”
Yes, I know. Browning turns in his grave.
And yes, I have noticed my creative use of adverbs. It is called poetic license.

LOVE AMONG THE RUINS

The velvet night was dark.
Yet it all stood out so stark,
Against the confusion that was your hair.

We stood in front of the walls,
That stood surrounding the dark halls.
Our love, we vowed, would never end.

The wind from the sea was salt, and sweet,
I saw you turn to me, watched our eyes meet.
But I never finished what I meant to say.

When I met you that night,
Your face was framed with ethereal light.
I was falling into the dark pools of your eyes.

The walls echoed softly, with whispers and sighs,
Of long dead lovers, their half-truths, and lies,
The ruined halls calm, and indifferent to our love.

We turned from each other, tears in our eyes,
I was a fool, and so we said our goodbyes.
But our love was enduring, as timeless as the ruins.

I meet you today, after eons, it seems,
And these ruins are the same, moonlight gleams
Off them tonight, as they have done for years.

Tap tap.
Hullo?
Tap tap.
Is this thing on?
Hullo?
Um.

Oh, right ho, then.
Um.

Ladeez and gemmen.
I thank the sensational one for my very first tag. 10 simple pleasures.
Ok. And here I go:
1. Shaving: Yes, I know. Weird. But it’s oddly therapeutic.
2. Writing: I love it. Enough said.
3. Reading poetry aloud: I do it, even if I’m alone. But its better if there is someone else in the room.
4. Having a snuffly wet nose nudge the back of your knee when you aren’t expecting it.
5. Listening to a song for the first time, and knowing that it is going to be one of your favorites forever.
6. Having warm feet. Like in the morning. Or at night, just before you fall asleep.
7. Sunlight in the winter. And peering at bright things through narrowed eyes, and watching the patterns you can squeeze the light into.
8. Watching someone read a really great book you told them about. And then talking about it with them.
9. Sitting, stuffed, around a table, with very old friends.
10. Aimless conversations that last till 3 AM in the morning.

In turn, I tag: shunshine, xiamaze, aarshi, mercuryshadow, agarwaen, and magnus.
Im sorry, It really is too much effort to link all of them, but they're all on my blogroll, anyway.