Talking Shadows

It burns me that we will make no new memories out of our chaos.

Did you want to watch the same thousand on repeat, our own reruns?

I wanted to see the world unfold in your dark eyes before everyone dies.

So why then, did we both decide to speak in ugly truths and pretty lies?

The bitterness is a creeping thing with strong hands that knows my pulse.

It chokes me with tears and pain and empty paths and charred results.

.

I've given you what I had lingering in my soul, all that was me.

It still sleeps on the nightstand in my mind and I wake to it every day.

I carved out the fresh saplings of my thoughts, transplanted them into you.

They grow in my chest; I water them when the sky's gone midnight blue.

When the shadows are dark and the moon is high...

I think about the music, the car, the taste of you and close my eyes.

.

There was a whisper of love caught in a slammed car door in the fall

Because I was too much of a coward to scream it from the parking lot.

But I liked it better that way, lodged in the leather and stuck to the doorsill.

You liked the accidents I made, the stumbles that made me weep.

Bright things must never be meant to last; they burn and burn and burn.

And then there's nothing left but ash and sand.

.

Dreams failed me.

.

I carved a bouquet for you out of the shadows I left at your bedside.

Why can't I remember more of those humid nights in houses I didn't own?

I put them on your walls every morning but you don't wake up early.

Why can't I remember the taste of my cigarettes in your mouth?

You stopped waking up early when I left and promised not to come back.

Where did all those little trinkets in my head disappear to?

.

Just look at the wall and we'll be teenagers forever, young and stupid.

I want to go to sleep.

Stay awake.

I want to drown.

Stay awake!

It's time to sleep.

.

Look at the flowers I've left you!

The shadows on the wall are an ugly thing.

They always were at night, the moonlight...

Distorts the natural order of things.

Don't start forgetting.

Where did my dreams go?

.

I fell asleep one night and decided to leave the mist of our love in a dream.

Then I woke up to cold sheets, empty cigarette cartons, and smoke.

I dug my hands in a river to find you pretty stones from the river bottom.

But you forgot that I had lost the last of my sanity thinking about you.

So I carved shadows out of our poetry, our darkness, our dreams.

And now I'm haunted by the sunrise and all our pretty, pretty lies.