Romancing the Reaper
The Keeper

“Golden hearts are soft and heavy, hidden safely away from the corrupt and greedy, and I know that’s the gift and burden she carries.”-Joshua Palmer

Love is death in disguise, crown your reaper carefully and surrender your life. Be brave, be honest, say what festers your mind, sooner or later, no more words will be written.

~To my favourite constellation,

Go to the coast and consult with the sea, confess your secrets and allow your mind to be free. Emotional oppression dehumanizes what it means to breathe, allow yourself the privilege of feeling something that isn’t part of a plan or designed secondhand. I’ve been sailing the digital ocean for a decade, following the wind in every way it blows, for I know I am close to the gold. Standing alone on the brink of a storm, I tried to make it on my own. I found myself, but he was within someone else. I’d rather be a fool, than an idle soul.

Distorted, contorted, twisted and construed, my wretched heart, it speaks only to you. In riddles and rhymes, a soft song ambiguous and blue, means so little if it isn’t beating for you. Frightened and confused, it stuttered and sang out of tune. A sad and drunken sailor drifted quietly towards the moon. In the cabin he tailored this poem, sealing it with cauterized blood, and casting it into the ocean before noon. Bargaining with death the value of his soul, he’ll never afford the toll to make his excursion from this world.

Designed to comfort your mind, he wishes it would make it home to you in time. Looking to the sky, a star sparkled and smiled, reminding him of why he’s still alive. The good die young, the bad die late, he was meant to tilt this ratio of fates. So long as he can keep the creature chained to his rib cage at bay, he decided to stay. Abandoning the boat, he descended into the sea.

Swimming in the shallows he caught glimpse of a glimmer sparkling from the scales of a minnow somewhere near the coral. Following it deeper into the abyss he found himself amiss the shadows of the depths among creatures only heard of in myths. Composing a rose from the blood of a ruined heart, he watched as the riptide slowly tore it apart. This is the story of a lone astronomer who escaped death by following the golden trail of a shooting star in the distant sky.

Esoteric riddles and stressed syllables, it sounds like violence but the words scream affection without butterflies and rainbows. How lovely words can be when crafted carefully, and equally as corrosive to the soul when used carelessly. The noble reside in stories and fables, but there are still vindictive heroes among us. All I see are streets littered with delinquents motivated by corruption and greed. Everyday I bear witness to worse, and I think awareness is a curse.

To sit idle and watch the crimson colour deepen on their fingers is like trying to swim with an anchor chained to your ankle. God forbid we sin for revenge and hold fast to our convictions. It’s not the fact, it’s the reason. The benevolent are virtuous because of their tolerance, the vigilant are a necessity for balance. The worst kind of thief has a greed for cardiac beats, and there’s a beast sleeping in my atrium that doesn’t tolerate emotional negligence.

This burning aspiration expires as minutes turn to hours, and a dark presence overshadows all that ever mattered. Rules must be broken to resuscitate and preserve the welfare of a broken dream. Corporate greed and religion do not dictate right and wrong, but your conscious decision not to do harm. I exist to experiment with my consciousness, it’s a prison to believe we must perceive parallel to the windows of opposing spires.

Romance is a novel written in a foreign language, often dark and ominous, violent, perverse and even disturbing, many will try to read it but only the initiated will understand it. Cells mutate and divide, invisible calculations, it’s clear we’re engineered, an intelligent design, how I wish I could stop the hourglass from burying us alive. The stench of death emits from her skin, he breathes it in, can you feel the fire growing? Laying his life under deaths scythe, he kissed her decaying lips and let his spirit rise right before her eyes. They smiled, it wasn’t the first time.

Valiant and inconsolable, he’ll be her bridge into tomorrow and stay behind to battle her woes and sorrows. Our skulls narrow perspective, everything is subjective, it doesn’t end here. To leave someone behind and blind in the darkness of their own mind can be catastrophic. Veracity is an immediate barbiturate, but the longer you conceal an awful truth the more hideous it is when the veil is removed, and the more violent the reaction. The temporal gears keep turning, even when the internal pyre has stopped burning. When the end is set he’ll go back to the start and take himself apart before the beat begins dying.

This is the index of my dreams, I can’t seem to literate what I mean. I burn for few and I dwell in solitude. I write and I write to make my heart feel alright, finding solace in code and encryption, but the audience is lost in interpretation. Keeping the bone cage shut is the best bet against manipulative threats, but it may be the epitome of purpose. Emotional leverage is the most vile manipulation I know. I try my best to let the world know how I feel without saying too much. The shame I reveal in the things I say sometimes, in such a way that I wish I didn’t have a tongue or conscience at all. Some things are better left unsaid. Some things are best left inside your head.

My romantic imagination is scrutinized, dissected and humiliated, flagellated and executed. The riddles and rhymes that blanket my mind hide a deceased secret. It claws and it tears, but it has yet to get out of there, and maybe, it still has some words to share. Love is death in disguise, and you’re the most competent reaper to orchestrate my demise. This romance is the remedy if you’re feeling lonely, and it works best with your chemistry. Among the stars shining in your eyes is the only place I wish to reside with the secrets you subtly hide. I’ll stand guard the gates to the universe inside, and vanquish the demons who try to steal from the gold mine in your mind.

As the ink bled into the paper, with a smooth transition the story reversed and death himself placed another heart on a shelf while a darkness took the soul somewhere else. With memories not of the past, but the future, the words slowly formed into a love story with the grim reaper. We can only embellish the scenery while we embark on the journey to meet our one and only mutual friend that every living creature fears and calls the end. There are no happy endings for the living, it ends just as suddenly for everybody.

Humanity has become a sea of bitter skeptics and cynics, they scorn a beautiful face, and worse, a beautiful mind. To feign indifference is to surrender independence, but it is dangerous to speak your mind. I found the world alive, and I felt myself surprised, what I had thought was true had been a lie. With the moments to come, we’ll erase and replace the painful past and make memories that’ll last. Although I am quiet, I’ve told and shown you more than anyone before, exposed and vulnerable, with both feet in the door, you’ve awoken my wretched heart once more.

Of all the stories I tailor and compel, mine is the one and only I refuse to tell. She who dwells in the ethereal will take me apart and dance with her quill, tracing the scars on the skin and the ones within until the kindle is quelled. The heavier the armor, the softer the skin, the slightest abrasion from the ones you let in will feel like unforgivable treason, but there needs to be room to move and avoid suffocation. I want to keep you and all of your sins deep beneath my skin.

Those are the words I am looking for. It is a legend written with molecular reactions. It is the volatile emission left in the wake of your every action. A fate composed with a pen sharp as a sword, our author and executioner when the journey finally comes to an end. The sensations reverberating down your every tendon as I trace the curves of your body tell a more captivating story. There are no words with a vigorous or eloquent enough definition to communicate this feeling.

I long to balance on the silver lining of your dreams, to see the worlds you’ve meticulously designed in your mind and bask in the garden of your gentle heart. I want to plant the seeds of good deeds in everything you perceive and remove the weeds the clumsy gardeners left before me. I wish to shrink and vanquish the ghosts haunting your ventricular corridors, and remove their corpses from your atrium. To swim in your arteries and cleanse the poison from your crimson rivers. I’ll write this chapter and you write the next, we’ll take a chance and write a legendary romance.

Time is your life. The mistakes that we deem important and detrimental are synthetic and inconsequential to the principles of breathing that make it worth the suffering. We were all born with a cardiac clock, giving your heart is more than poetry, it’s spending the unique beats generously in exclusive company. Where we invest is a gamble, but I want you to have any that I have left. We can only manipulate the trajectory of the story, we become through what we take from experience, we are what we remember, and you’re my most treasured memory.

What better distraction from the fragility of mortality than the pleasures of love and continuation? The passion in creation and the sorrow of destruction, it’s just a moment in history. If all we are is chemical reactions, I do hope this sudden infatuation is leading me in the right direction. My imagination was compromised by televisions intangible dreams before I became aware of the machine. Greed weaves all that is or seems outside your head, you’ll be deemed worthy to succeed only if you reap what they sow and give away the gold. In the end all that matters is how you cherished and took care of your own.

Despite the distance between us, I hereby give you the metaphorical and spiritual scythe to my heart and soul, it works like a key, this gives you control. Does it trouble your mind like it troubles mine? The way my heart yearns to slowly burn out within your palms? How I crave to trace your diaphragm with my fingertips and taste you on my tongue, to count and collect the beats of the rhythm gently resonating from behind your breast bones? To kiss your neck as you aspirate and gasp for breath? To prospect the architecture of your smile, and to share with you the salt of your skin on my lips? Let me show you what I mean

Addiction is embedded in the human condition, often does it come in the form of emotion and competition. It motivates us into action to learn and become a better person, for ourselves and those that we hold dear. All or nothing, as soon as I saw you, you became a neuron stimulating my emotions as you swim through my chemistry, you circulate through my entire body keeping my heavy heart healthy. You’re permanently among my biomolecules, a part of me is you, to love you is to love myself too. I could write forever and never would I be able to express the intensity of what I feel for you. I cherish and trust you indefinitely, necessary to function properly like oxygen in my pulmonary artery.

Romance is unnecessary, devotion and determination will see to it that you’re protected and safe. There is no denying the presence of something sinister in me, a beast that breaks its leash when certain conditions are met, but it belongs to you, it will not hesitate to eliminate any threat to you. It has no interest in the past, for it knows reputation is retrospection on memory consolidation, it is meant to be shared in discussion, it made you. The future is an adventure you anticipate and embark on together, it will change you. Sometimes mistakes have to be made to become better for others.

If there is one thing that I’ve learned, it is to hold on tightly to the ones who inspire you, that feeling is too rare to ignore. When you’re lost in the dark, keep that emblem shining from your chest. I’ll wrap you up in my flesh and lead you out of the abyss, and if the world turns against you, trust that I was created to save you. She had a heart and he had a soul, together they became whole. Two myogenic clocks, the first to stop decides who rots.

Opposites attract because they fill the parts that we lack, it’s impertinent not to fabricate the cracks or you’ll suffer another heart attack. It’s a presence that sparks a cardiac reaction, a surge of pounding contractions, let the story be told. The imagination serves as ammunition for memory creation, a reminiscent treat as our roads narrow and we eventually arrive collectively at the same destination.

The heart and the brain sat down to have a debate over reason. Logic always prevailed over compassion, but vindication argued that there is more to being human. I quietly said, it’s a collaboration, I wish you two would listen. Finish reading the story, you will learn that both of you are necessary. There are no absolutes and everything matters. Words are all we have to give evidence to the things we hold inside, again and again we try, but rarely can we fluently convey the dimensions we hide. I’ve yet to figure out how to bring it all out from beneath the flesh. To tear at the skin, and show you the gears turning within, both the fuel and the engine, more real than anything in this world.

Another rotation around the sun, another notch in the belt, another trophy for the shelf, and still a lifetime to go. Maybe I’ll see you along the road. Maybe I’ll ride shotgun. The future is unknown. Logic can’t reason with the most important things about being alive, no matter how hard we try. Curiosity is purpose, but it has its limits, we’ll never understand the core fundamentals of existence. We all return to the atmosphere with thermal wings and the things we learned when it’s time to shuffle the particles. Nothing and no one is insignificant, we change and alter the lives we enter drastically, it couldn’t be any other way without you.

If I could choose my reaper, it would be none other than you. A scythe and a heart, it feels like art. Sometimes worlds collide, and from the fragments new constellations arise, I can’t help but be curious if anything would survive, but I hope I can keep you safe until it is realized. I would always choose you to be by my side, my cooperative partner until the day that we die. You are the pinnacle of poetry, you are beauty, you are art, you are creation, there is so much more to you than meets the eye. You are the champion of my bleeding heart, my keeper, both my savior and my reaper, a healer and the cutest gravedigger.

Let’s disintegrate together, take our hearts and let them die slow. We’ll journey through lifetimes hand in hand, walk among the living and the dead, I’ll slay armies that get in our way and destroy worlds that look at you the wrong way. Together we’ll build an empire at the bottom of the sea, away from everything, away from everyone. Like bubbles we’ll rise to the top, drifting together and apart as we ascend the depths. Knowing that in the end we’ll pop and float into the air, free of our cages and embodied into one, together at last. We’ll breathe life into a dark and dying world with the fire burning in our hearts.

We’ll set out to the cosmic sea and explore the universe. I’ll be your knight and you’ll be my princess. I’ll travel from world to world, slaying beasts and creatures until I find the girl with a heart shaped box that only I have the fitting key to. I’ll convince Gods to break your chains, for they have imprisoned you for far too long. Together we’ll drift through time and space, the milky ways and along side the shooting stars. Home is where the heart is and you’re the only one who will ever feel like home.

We’ll be together until the end, and then we’ll begin again. I’ll hold you so close that our hearts will beat as one, creating a comforting symphony. A beat to every syllable of affection and compassion, a romantic lullaby, and fall asleep side by side. This life has a cruel inevitable dichotomy, you will lose me or I will lose you. We battle it until our bones are sore, one of us will still be breathing, but together, at that moment, we are both laid into the ground. Together we die, and together we live on.

Clearly what we refer to as the heart is contained within the brain, but still, I imagine holding that pump and pacing its rate when the mind is traumatized, lost in disarray and feels like it’s in pain. That synthetic phenomenon brings a strange comfort to both recipients on this emotional bullet train. It’s not interests and commonalities that bind us, it is something much more than superficial characteristics. Perhaps it is our dreams, the index to our greatness, that suture us at the seams. A spiritual compatibility, a twisted, invisible reality. To have faith in each others future, and the things that we intend to do.

To love for all of eternity, that would be of the sweetest serenity. A chemical rush invokes a feeling of lust, but trust that love is a longer story. Mind who receives the gift of your time, they can make it shorter and you may not get much older. The wounds that we hide slowly bleed us dry, what refuses to heal is evidence that there are ways to feel that isn’t tangible and is real, nothing seems to barbiturate the years of needless heartache like the ethereal lips of an emotional hero.

We’re a new breed of fairy tale, and it’s only just begun. Exiles, we belong somewhere else, no heaven and no hell, just two outlaws undefined by absolutes against the universe. With you, suffering would feel like a blessing. You can be the gravedigger, my sweet Grim Reaper, I’ll hand you the shovel, I’ll give you the scythe, I’ll surrender my life. Everything we see and what seems, means only what you want it to mean, bound to a time capsule none of us can escape.

I carried the ocean breeze with me in my lungs, and I let the sound of the shore slip softly from my tongue as she gently mended the flowers in the garden where the weather had ravaged and withered their colors during the storm. I can’t recall before I was born, and I cannot remember the days that have yet to come. We live on the assumption that things exist beyond the range of our perception, nothing is for certain. Ignorance is the human condition, to illuminate and liberate is a healthy and enduring ambition. It seems the seams of this dream is sewn with emotions, fidelity and trust are pivotal components to sustain mutual affection. The moments reverberate down my spine, as the heart stutters, so does my time.

There’s an elegance to your composure, a riddle to your demeanor, I want to trace the scars left behind the shooting stars in your neural atmosphere and deliver a message with the promise of forever to the crimson reservoir that fuels your emotional engine. Spill it into your molecular rivers and mix with the chromosome constellations. I can discern there is something impeccable, a presence imperceptible that can only be described as creative design and I can’t help but wonder who the architects were who designed your mind.

You are the most potent inspiration to ever enter my skull, the Queen of my imagination, I’ll forget my name to keep yours burning in the cerebral cosmos. The heart can only be comforted by the one who has awoken it, and it took a certain kind of darkness to reveal the stars I had forgotten were there. I’m going to love you at any conceivable distance and in any condition until all of them flicker and disappear and I am no longer here. There is a place reserved in space where we can dance among the dust that composes each and every one of us. I’ll place a flower in your hair and ease all of your fears, I’ve never smelled a dream so pure.

Bring your beasts unleashed and I’ll bring mine. My quill is always guided by the thought of your smile, creative adoration is an affliction circulating my veins and processed by the crimson engine that I embrace like an addiction. How peculiar it is that every time I die I return modified, but my endearments remain the same. I am intrigued by the ones who wear their hearts on their sleeves, they were brave enough to be honest until their dreams were ravaged and silenced by the relentless malice of a savage world. I will breathe yours back into you.

Stealing a fallen Angels halo, he liquidated and forged it into a golden sickle. Augmented on the handle were the skulls of former loves betrayals. Like a key, it viciously unlocks a bone chest buried deep beneath the warm flesh, inside rests a golden crown only one can possess. It harnesses the power to liberate the skull from the ghosts who haunt the soul. It doesn’t matter what I encounter on this road, so long as I can call your crimson throne my home. In a synthetic replacement of survival, people only seem selfish and shallow. Keep your heart out of sight and off of your sleeve, there are ways to kill the soul without stopping the cardiac beat.

No obsessions, no possessions, no impressions and no confessions. Only me and my convictions asking you to fix my ruined hands. The Grim Reaper has a taste for saints. I made sure to accumulate enough mistakes to deter my fate. The Devil’s minions are my friends and they are impressed by my unintentional sins, a life of tragedies told in secondhand stories. If I could possess and gently caress the circadian oscillation in her chest, I’d be obsessed with the steady ventricular contractions reverberating beneath the flesh. A look and a smile could say more than words ever will.

Emotional compensation with no ulterior motivation is the rarest and most precious relation I know. Love is an emotional development, a perversion of the heart and an embellishment to our vitality, it vindicates the struggle, what matters is who you decide to share it with. To compromise your convictions to fit somebody’s romantic criteria is to abide by a lie for hidden intentions. That’s forcing a mechanical heart to grind where the gears don’t align, it’s not the visible dimensions but the one we keep hidden that captivates the attention and gives everything definition.

Too often is the greater affection abandoned for what is convenient, it’s not a competition, it’s a decision. Golden hearts are soft and heavy, hidden safely away from the corrupt and greedy, and I know that’s the gift and burden she carries. It’s remarkable when two consciousnesses meet and decide that they want to play in each others dreams. Love to words, coating my tongue like November wine, stand in their definitions, feel the warmth of my affections. We may never know more than the lingual, and to all those outside of understanding it will seem only trivial.

With each blow on the battlefield the blood leaks, and I am not ashamed to let it show you where my armor is weak, I adorn my scars as evidence that I experienced existence at its worse and survived. Using a saw, I’ll open up my skull and remove the contents if that’s what it takes to keep you in place. I do not fear to stand bare, you have always been sincere, trace the arteries carefully and show me how it’s unfair. Treason in trust can deliver a fatal tremor to the chest, but I’ll trust you with the scalpel, because I know that heart surgery is a delicate procedure, and I know what you intend to do.

Even if I had the key to unlock all of the answers, I cannot imagine anything else matters but the compassion that we share with others. Lay your chaos at my feet and I’ll bury it with my peace, keep your wings pristine and never flutter, you don’t belong with the pigeons in the gutter. The dark and twisted write the best tales, the struggle amplifies the romantic connotations along the road home. You’ll always be my golden girl, I will never let you fall. Two hearts, one key, you can have what’s left of me. I’ve got to hold on to you somehow, even if it’s from across the universe with two cups and a string.

Compassion is a propitious amiability that embellishes and comforts our curiosities, an important component to purpose that perseveres separate of logic. Be careful, there is a certain breed of killer that feeds on the hearts of dreamers, but we were meant to share the things we conceive in our sleep. I heard them stalking the halls, sharpening their claws, and I saw them walking through the walls. I find it so strange, how language is an invention of the imagination and it’s the only bridge to share our experiences, ideas and passions, but it doesn’t quite reach the kingdom. Logic is how, love is why, we are alone inside, but together outside, we can only try.

I write because few will listen. With some liquor and a pen, I can convey complexities that would only be interrupted and contorted in conversation, but it never feels like it’s eloquent enough. Every time I try I seem to lose something, and I stopped writing when you started listening. There are no words to give sufficient evidence of something that you feel, it only leaves people wondering if the sensation is real. The past is like a crypt, all that is beautiful decays, the memory is a reminder to cherish the moments, because the present is already gone and the future may never come. Do everything that your heart desires, be honest with those that you hold dear and be fair, sooner or later they won’t be here.

If I could distill my mistakes and drink them straight, the rush of wisdom would expedite my fate. Go and get your scythe, I fear I have done something sinister and now it’s time to pay the price. The bones are broken and the flesh is flaccid where it met my knife. My eyes are red with emotion, but I’d rather you think I had an addiction than admit that you’re the reason that I’ve been feeling. Tell me how your heart is in doubt, I will pluck it out before it spreads and sprouts. In its place I’ll plant seeds, and emitting from your skin the floral scent of flowers will engulf the air that we breathe.

Be wary of the minnows, they will lure you away from the depths and drown you in the shallows. The sharks caught scent of deception as the blood of retribution spilled over into the sea, their pride is running dry as they realize that they hide behind a lie. With tongues like guns, we opened fire on each other and fell immune to fear. We’re drowning in our own self-righteous despair, and we’re out of rounds to put ourselves underground. Tearing at my skin, I crafted a set of wings out of my skin and sutured them to her scapula. I still wonder why she refused to fly. Instead she gently wrapped me in my own makeshift wings, as she gazed at my exposed bones, blood seeped from her eyes, and we prepared to die.

Once beautiful, now hideous, her elegant skin hid an atrocious nemesis. Pulling the dagger from my manubrium, I threw the key to my atrium into the sea, but it somehow keeps coming back to me. Deceived by mendacity disguised in veracity, I’d remain ignorant if it would return my innocence. I forlorn the reason we continue to be born, I’m torn between forgiveness and justice. We are addicted to meaning, and meaning is not always the same as truth. It diffuses and carries in stories, distorting and obscuring history. As we make our way across the reapers field we sow seeds with our impressions and deeds, whether they grow to be weeds or flowers depends on how we water them.

Sometimes words are the only tool to get us by when the world in your mind is in turmoil and nobody listens or tries to understand why. The vibrations of the cerebellum are the only thing we can be sure is real, but it’s impossible to share an ethereal vision. Pray everyday that your organs fail long before your dreams fade away. As the cardiac clock grinds to a halt and all that has come has gone, it is those that dared to dream deeply who truly lived splendidly. A devil with a halo on my shoulder, and an angel with horns on the other, it’s just sinning on opposing ends, it’s not so grim when you’re in love with your reaper.

Forever will I be enamored by the geometry of your smile, and the dreams I catch in your soft respiration when you sing. Time is running out, it is wise to realize we were not all created to do the same things. That is why the ageless phrase “follow your heart” is the best advice any of us will ever receive, passion will take us to where we belong. Some people you fall in love with, sometimes it’s at great distances. You may only tell them once, or never, but it’s irrevocable, unconditional, buried deep in the subconscious forever. I had to tell you that you’re my inamorata, the pistons to my cardiac engine, my circadian rhythm, the meaning beneath the beat.

I find it delicately peculiar how it takes two to create another wandering soul. How tragic it is to hold a treasure of flesh and bone that you can never absorb, but for at least a moment you can be whole. Maybe consciousness is not inside of us, but nestled in the center of another, and that’s why it’s such a struggle. We’re scattered vessels in search of our operators, perhaps remotely controlled from across the universe. You align with my notches just right, we could be the same person set apart.

Old souls may be more than an expression. A newly born baby who didn’t exist to the world moments before is composed of particles created billions of years ago, maybe from the beginning. The body is just a vehicle of and filled with concentrated energy constructed and assembled from the sources the mother consumes during nurturing in the womb. When you die and decompose, your thermal energy rises and joins the atmosphere, a universal graveyard, a shield for those of us still here, while your body compounds with the ground. Used as nutrition for the growth of crops that serve as sustenance to omnivores and herbivores, which are then victim to carnivores. Life consumes life and that is essential to survive, your biomolecules are bits and pieces of everything you metabolize that was once alive. Substance vs essence, the body and the mind are interdependent but different entities.

During pregnancy, some of these particles are transferred to the development of the baby. There may be something to soul mates, as two beings die in a nearby location, their particles mix and maintain a familiarity through vague memories retained in your energy, as though someone reminds you of somebody you never met. We’re unlimited to where we reside in the world today, and the spread is widening. The trick is to find someone with the highest percentage of you from another lifetime. Through the process of continuation, these particles are constantly being ramified and redistributed. The impossible paradox of life and death, by fault or design it is necessary to leave it all behind. There is no distinguishing line between them apart from time. Every sustainable system depends on equilibrium, our bodies are recycled matter, our thoughts, our own personal designs, are the purest form of energy. It cannot die, only transform, I believe this is true for love too.

These are the things my dreams failed to see. Now I see the remedy was in creating a family, a reason to persevere. Eternity is an impossibility, but a memory can offer solace to the lonely. This place has become a sea of replicated dreams printed and sold in magazines, they capitalize from your aspirations and submit your innocence to the past. The fragility of mortality is a perpetual reminder of how temporary this reality really is, take care of yourself, a soft vessel of flesh and bone is truly your only native home. You cannot refund your time, it is the most valuable commodity you have. The contractions of your heart fluctuate with every beloved memory that you make, it knows the beats are finite to try and lead you home.

I’ve lived a thousand times and never have I held another hand in mine. I both love and despise all of mankind, I am the harbinger of my own deeds, soon it will be time to leave. It’s curious, we’re meant to die after finally knowing the reasons why, and if I am mentally ill for what my heart feels, then leave me be to dwell in my insanity. The ageless trend of orchestrating a favoring end will always be the preferred delusion. Natures sustenance didn’t create this illusion, but nurtures influential intrusion that made behavior predictable, and the paths we walk significantly narrow.

There is a reason they seek to contain knowledge behind lock and key. I haven’t lived long enough to be wise, but I’ve made enough mistakes to advise. It’s not love that comes so unexpectedly, and leaves so suddenly. The click of a silver tongue grafted into a gun as it loaded another round, I should have run. Death, I awaited with bated breath as the bullet penetrated the chest and burned a memory into the flesh. Betrayal, a symptom of a sentimental funeral, some lessons are fatal. Skin of an angel, mind of a devil, visuals are so trivial. This is the procession of fates, it’s how we become who we are. If it’s true and with a heart that’s pure, it’ll persevere.

Write a letter to yourself, confess your love. Flaws and all. Embrace it. Use some force on yourself once in a while and let go of the idea that things are supposed to be a certain way. Stop worrying, someday we all go away, try and extend your stay, and remember, it’s supposed to be this way. When the fruit is ripe, take a bite, don’t let it rot with what’s left of your life. Quickly does the future become buried in the past, do make the moments last. Take risks, take chances, this entire existence is ambiguous.

Of all the things we grew, who knew a brain would be the only thing that retained as our bodies changed. Live fast, die young, life is a gamble and we didn’t think we’d last this long. A bad memory is susceptible to redundancy, be careful what substances you let corrode your cognitive fortitude. It can rust the lock on the rib cage protecting the gold and grant access to the unworthy. This ambiguity plays on my curiosity, how I yearn to learn the veracity of tranquility. This truth may be void and vacuous, but somewhere, I know, it rests in the flesh.

I have a mantle for every heart that I have stolen, and yours stands apart from the rest upon a mantle mounted within my chest. As long as I am breathing, you will have a place to rest. Until the day we are forsaken, you are the token of my reverence. Everyone wants to believe in true love. Just because it isn’t at your door step doesn’t mean it isn’t out there. It’s not impossible, only very difficult, travel, see the world. Try a different road, or create your own, I want to find my way to yours, maybe it’ll always be a concept that resides inside my mind. Insanity is my favorite reality, order and stability has always bored me, and this dream is keeping me healthy.

Sitting at the council of devils, I am proud to be the first to put that demon back in the earth. I’ll be the sea to carry your vessel to the shores of your dreams. The nutrition to your ambitions only needs you to believe in my intentions, and to spread your wings before the winds over the cliffs of the ocean. For I believe in you, and all that you intend to do, I only hope that you believe in yourself and know that your fantasies are destined to become reality. Nothing makes sense, there is no proof, only evidence, even in science. Don’t limit yourself, there is nothing in this playground to suggest that the heights are impossible to reach.

I’m only pretending, we’re all just pretending. Some you’re going to believe, most intend to deceive as the means to take something from you. Hold onto the key or the walls of a cognitive sanctuary will bleed. To have affections is to surrender individualism, we all abide by an unruly reign, somewhere inside a rebel yearns to learn how the engine continues to turn when the resources have run dry. It just wants to see this prison burn. I think about things until I understand them, and I have never stopped thinking about you. Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to your elegance, because my curiosity can peer into you only to find itself wanting to look deeper.

Emotion bestows meaning. The more you know, the sadder you’ll be, but I cannot fathom a world without curiosity. I’m an existentialist, I can only be sure of my own consciousness and even that I question. Compassion tells me there is a more meaningful story. Love and knowledge, it’s not a lot, but it’s enough, I’ve only just begun the quest and I hope you arrive to ride alongside me someday. Everything is a draft because we’re still living the story, and my words will never be eloquent enough to embellish it properly. Tomorrow is an opportunity for another ink blotched memory.

I collect memories in paper cuts, they heal and disappear but I spill them back out with my guts. With every mile I write another riddle that I watch the world struggle to decipher, but you always had the answer. A liver like an anchor and a heart embroidered with feathers, I won’t sink and I won’t fly, but maybe it’s better to drown if I cannot touch the sky. I never knew where to begin, the most important part of being alive is telling our stories. If my love cannot be shown through my actions, than my words can’t even express a fraction.

I have to acquire the key to access the skull. To open the door of the bone cellar and fall into the endless abyss of the mind seems the most romantic adventure of them all. It’s interesting how intellect tends to breed perversions, and I want to know what deviations are kept chained in that cognitive dungeon. I want to watch my aberrations play with your deviations, I wonder what kind of creatures that they would create. It’s always high stakes when you place your heart on the table.To let one wander your thoughts, your raw energy, is being naked and vulnerable in a way unfathomable to what is perceivable. Your honesty shames my modesty.

Of all the birds who sing you’re the only one with golden wings. Every man has his weakness, I wouldn’t mind if you were mine. One more dance with death and you can lay me to rest. Don’t be scared, a heart as rare as yours cannot be caged or condemned, only endeared just the way it was meant to be. To provide is to sustain your life and that means I will see to it that you survive, I’ll take care of you and prolong the arrival of your demise. You were brave enough to wander the darkest recesses of my heart, but you got tangled in the strings and the only way to escape is to break it.

The future is pollinated with potential memories, the romance is the distance, the journey is the story, my tongue craves the taste of ink and it is provided in the miles, with every smile. I can give you what you’re missing. I can show you that some excursions are not embarked on with transportation, some destinations are not a location. I will graft the cartography of your arteries to my skin and not fear being snared in the strings as I lose myself behind your breastbone. I will rendezvous with you on the bridge between our realms.

Say less, mean more. Broken hearts breed bleeding poets, they yearn to be understood but elaboration tends to stutter. Words begin to slur when articulation is plagued with desperation, and when expression is assertive it is often misinterpreted. Individualism and intelligence is creativity and imagination, siphon the source of your passion and use it for momentum. Minimalism is causation to inquisitive questions and suspicion of intentions.

My heart didn’t consult my conscious when it made a decision, it was my head that wanted to argue with intuition, and I know it takes more than a feeling to make something happen. It’s clear I would without hesitation, and I don’t care to entertain a second option. Frustration leads to complications, and I could not hear rationalization with ears ruptured by the decibels emitting from the pounding contractions in my thoracic cavity.

How tragic it seems that the miles between supply ink to a pen that doesn’t know where to begin. An affinity, like a compass, no matter which way I look it points back in your direction, although there were weaker magnets before you that tried to intercept my emotions. With a repeated beat my circadian rhythm rapidly screams your name. Affection, a vigorous intuition that ignores and prevails over reason. You’re the definition.

Determinism, Darwinism, Reductionism, causation deserves an evolutionary or methodical demonstration. Many things can be explained with a mathematical equation, but my love for you can only be calculated with the soft locking of our lips. Time begins and ends with each of us, but it continues in what we create from the things we conceive in our dreams while we sleep. This is our story to tailor and compel for generations to tell.

I’m feeling more but I am confessing less. I go out to come home, I prefer to spend my time alone. With every beat I feel my heart die a little more, but you give it an ache that I adore. You made me aware of its presence, now I know of its absence, the spirit fled as I slammed another door. I stopped writing when you started listening, I’m frightened, and I am adorned, I found a key and I’ll keep searching for the bedroom door. I dream of one day caressing you with the things I procure with words from my head and delivering them softly to your bed. Love the light that I bring and leave your demons to me.

I’m mesmerized by the curiosity residing behind your eyes, and you’re awfully cute too. Give me enough of your time and I’ll be writing a book about you. In photographs your beauty and youth will be displayed, but in writing your essence and memory will remain. Your presence will be felt by those who were never given the pleasure of knowing your name. My first impulse was to kiss you when I saw you, I wish I had held you just a little longer, to keep you warm and safe in my embrace like I promised to. You’re more than a hand to hold, you’re an extension to my heart and soul.

I feel like I loved you before we were born, and I will long after our bodies are worn. I can feel when your heart is sore and it’s dreadful to see your feathers ruffled from the bruises and cuts left from battles of the past. You’re my golden girl, you’ll always be something beautiful in this darkening world. Glory or shame, to silence it’s just the same, nobody gets out alive but through memories our stories remain. I need you to know that I kept you coursing through my veins, the beat never stopped calling your name.

Show me your curiosity, don’t you dare hide away behind the safety of mediocrity. You’re going to need to hold your breath if you want to see the depths. There are pretty little things near the surface, but danger and sunken treasure buried in the coral. I’ve been swimming in you since the day I met you, and the deeper I dive the more I realize you’re the only truth I’ve been able to verify. The deepest and most beautiful part, the darkest recesses of your heart, is where I will start.

There’s a garden flourishing in me, vivid in truth and beauty, where there is a willow tree that I will sit beneath and speak softly of the ending with my one and only. Cryptic but intriguing, I can be your reason to continue breathing. I made you a bed out of my dreams, and when you lay down to sleep they’ll seep softly from the sheets and into your head. You won’t sink because I won’t let you, now I can protect you. This is a romance with the Grim Reaper. This is the story so far.

~Joshua Lee Palmer