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.