Stapled Hearts

Let me chisel your name into my skin

With a crooked, lopsided instrument,

And if you stop me half way

Please don’t ask me to do it again,

But do you remember when we ran madly in grassy fields?

You with your lame leg, me with my gun,

We were hopeless romantics in those days

Without a care or a future between us,

Now all we do is lounge around and stare at the caskets

That hang like geraniums from our ceiling fans,

Each one represents a day that I won’t call you

Even though I crawl in the dark to hear your voice,

Like a serpent or a wounded shepherd

Without resolve, without a choice,

Suppose you were as daft as I am

Would you strain to smite your demons still?

Pressing into your back like knives

Poisoning your lips at a touch,

Hoisting you up on their bent shoulders

So that you can see the moist gods of the river delta,

One more word out of either of us and they’ll crack the code

On the safe that hides our strait jackets,

One for you, several for the both of us

Master-less wanton Ronin that we are,

If they could only put a strait jacket on our tarnished love

That pulls us together as well as apart,

Once free, now taken wildly

Hand in hand, then torn apart,

By delirious animals that danced to the rhythm

Of a thousand dying broken hearts,

We once had a future together

Long before the oceans withered,

Long before the bridges crumbled

And long before we had to part.