The Moonless Midnight

I

The night lies still,

Hanging above like a sword,

Waiting to cut through

the strained silent screech of

the quaint trees and the unmoving shadows of the sleeping wilderness.

I sit in the balcony staring up

At the black sky stitched seamlessly

With delicate threads of

a few elusive stars, that sit loftily,

Mocking the ones gazing with awe.

I’m afraid to breathe,

The air is stagnant, unmoving.

It sits in my throat, heavy

Like a letter hidden

in a secret compartment

of my weary, mahogany desk.

The houses are barges

Casting shadows of an enticing quiet

that has laid it’s concrete feet

in this town.

II

My heart is like the fresh carpet,

Lying in the door.

It holds the unearsed prints of your feet,

As you left in the middle of the night.

The moon beckoned you to return,

the lonely barn owl cried in dismay, the night wind howled in misery

and my door shivered

in the agony of loss.

I lay there counting;

counting as seconds turned into minutes,

and minutes into hours.

The sun rose and fell

but I stayed pivoted to the bed,

as though by an invisible force

that prohibited any more change.

As though perhaps a single movement, may testify to the time as it passed by,

that my pain was deepening,

with each round of the clock.

Perhaps if I stayed still

I might fall into numbness.

Any second now.

Any second.

III

I now sit on the bedspread

As the winter lightly kisses my feet.

I take its shivering hand in mine

And rouse it up;

Gently caress it with my fingers

And I feel the warmth within 

its heart so shrouded with pain.

The pain of longing, of desertation,

Of absence and of the estrangement;

Like a wounded lover whose:

Scars remember the wound,

And skin remembers the blade.

I sit beside its defeated figure

And lay my sorrow and longing

Out on the red velvet carpet,

Beneath our blue feet.

And I embrace it in my arms,

Close to the warm blood

deluging through my veins; 

Closer.

Until it curls up inside my soul,

And subsumes my warmth.

A dark smoke engulfs all that was before, crystal clear; 

whose smell is a faint reminder 

of unfinished evenings and 

quiet nights at end.

And lastly but not the least,

I set my head, numb, 

down on the carpet,

And close my eyes to the solitary ray of light, left unattended to by the contiguous dark ;

Prying furtively through 

scarcely scattered fissures in my window.

The bedspread frozen indelibly,

within memory.