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Madison's Lament
Love is a cruel raindrop
Quavering, a fragile silhouette, on the curve of a windowsill.
The lightest breeze
Will dash it away.
There can be no mercy for the breathless promise of a dream.
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When sleepless eyes are closed
Memories replay as cracked film against a grainy backdrop.
Here they cannot be lost,
Wrapped, blood-red, and treasured forever,
Pulsating in the spidery shadow of a heart.
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Why is time stolen
Like a careless trinket held in a rich woman's palm,
When all lovers are beggars longing for a single bejeweled kiss?
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Only days we spent trapped in each other's arms.
Patching wounds,
Making a sanctuary of our sheets,
Sacrificing and worshipping, reaching for the heavens.
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Only days.
Splayed across the endless canvas of time,
An hour is only sixty minutes,
Then only sixty flurried seconds,
Only a tender heartbeat to love and to lose.
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Happiness is quenched
By the heavy snows of winter
Before it can begin.
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Fate makes fools of us all.
It laughs a macabre laugh, mangles with its scarlet sword,
Stained with the blood of the innocent,
Until nothing can remain but this frozen misery;
And life clings to a swinging pendulum which feels no pity.
The rain and ice drops to earth,
To its death,
As one.
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The dark murderer Fate
Will find its victims in the strangest of ways.
A puddle of rainwater.
The deadly and bitter cold.
Lungs filled with stinging liquid
In the depths of a waterlogged winter.
Killed by an evil man are little boys and their fathers,
And the women who will wither away without them.