Once I sank sand castles, now all I can do is dream

We used to build dreams, towering projections that reached the Milky Way, paper cut outs that covered every corner of the horizon, and painted rocks that reminded us that once we were young and together we will grow old.

They were castles enveloped in green valleys, yellow cabins lined on the edges of the foamy sea, and fantasies with light shadows and dark ink bleeds.

Dreams filled in with hues of our imagination, a world so distant from reality, so foreign to humanity,

It was our yellow paradise in icy blue, our transparent dimension of philosophical lust, a precious pearl formed from the grains of our designs.

We sat on the moon, tracing our fingers across the silky sky, drawing Roman knights and indigo kites, making silent wishes in the middle of the night to the sequence of time, whispering sweet lullabies of the past through invisible electric lines.

We became invested in the magical aura of our dreams, began planting seeds of hope and endless lace  of love, so we lost sight of being conventional, of being neatly folded and orderly put away like wedding gowns.

We put our incubus moments in a bottle and sailed them into the salty aquamarine galaxy, hoping for a phenomenon, hoping science would fail and drown our fears.

It all seemed so lucid and sweet, like citrus fruit picked from the finest tree or a rare gem discovered from the roughest cave.

You were the shade of crimson coated blood, you drenched and drained my dry soul, embedded a mystic tale then left me imploring for more.

Infected and diseased, you contaminated my brain cells with toxic desires and lit up my heart with your chemical gases,

I was mesmerized, moved by your maddening hypothesis and incorrect solutions, you made me feel broken and young, like glorious gypsies on the run, so I walked down your road of ivy and thorns, I held your tears in the palm of my hands, kissed and blew them into the desert sands.

I wanted to fill your world with a rapturous glow, to become every tangent and erase every inch of your melancholy strokes,

But the day came when you became weary of watching me through a window, of counting the syllables in my sentences,

 You wanted something tangible, something you could brush your hands through, polished leather and satin linen,

Memories and images could not be textures and touch, they were rhythmic riddles, clever mirages, and sentimental illusions, but they did not hold a promising future, they did not make illustrations move methodically as breathing molecules.

So you walked on, stretched your fingers across the globe and marched as a solemn soldier to another shore,

The Ferris wheel kept turning, my face was burning, and my hands waving in the middle of the callous sea, but you could only watch with glacier eyes, I became a ghost, a mere shadow, an unpleasant joke with aging grief and powdered belief.

You stopped looking at the moon, and making wishes at night, you said it’s impossible with this distance and time, but those are just increments and measurements of reality, Just properties created by the human mind.

But the hole became monumental, you were always fragile and delicately structured so you tucked away our dreams; you buried our world under tectonic plates and poured our colors into the bay.

The only thing that remained was the bottle of grotesque thoughts floating over the swinging waves, proof that fears can never be drowned, dreams and sand castles can wash away in the ocean, but pain and guilt will always swarm inside, will always eat at the membrane of time.

But I will not decay, turn into ashes and vanish into thin air because I have faith,

My figment of belief will rise to touch the light and I will travel to the moon and make wishes every day.

Author's Note

Sometimes you meet people who change you, they love you, they move you, and well then i write about them.

Reviews

[Steven]

Thick. Enjoyed the ride.

[Alexis]

I'm quite stunned by this piece. It was really interesting to me and fun to read. I don't know what else I can say. Great job! :)

[Aarontastic]

This is a very clever and ambitious piece of work =] It made me smile when I was reading it. I love poems that employ imagery, and this one is absolutely overloaded with it...every line is replete with descriptive language and emotion, but you still manage to advance the story without getting too bogged down in the words you are using to convey your thoughts and feelings.

Most people do end up living life and falling in love and losing their loves, but not everyone is moved by their experiences quite as much, and that's a big part of what makes artistic types different. To a more prosaic mind, the experience you write about here could have just been dismissed as another banal relationship that had run its course, but I love how you describe it--the beginnings of the relationship, when you both felt your strongest, you describe in whimsical and dream-like terms, and there are many outstanding lines that stuck out:

"We used to build dreams, towering projections that reached the Milky Way, paper cut outs that covered every corner of the horizon, and painted rocks that reminded us that once we were young and together we will grow old.

They were castles enveloped in green valleys, yellow cabins lined on the edges of the foamy sea, and fantasies with light shadows and dark ink bleeds."

Those passages near the start were some of the best ones. Vivid imagery like that is sprinkled throughout. When the relationship started to grow stale because of 'distance and time', the descriptions go from optimistic and youthful to melancholy.

I think the most clever point about the poem was how you explicitly equated your person's initial love with dreaminess and innocence, and deliberate foolishness in a way ("moved by your maddening hypothesis and incorrect solutions", etc.) while the cold and drearily realistic scientific point of view was how his perception was at the end of the relationship ("You stopped looking at the moon, and making wishes at night, you said it’s impossible with this distance and time"). Despite the kind of sad ending to that, the poem ended on an optimistic note and it seems like you're determined to keep being a dreamer and the romantic type ("But I will not decay, turn into ashes and vanish into thin air because I have faith, My figment of belief will rise to touch the light and I will travel to the moon and make wishes every day").

So I enjoyed it a lot =] The only thing that I felt could be improved was the "control" over your imagery and stuff....sometimes there was so much of it that it seemed like it was out of control, and you were just contriving some parts in order to load up the poem with every cool description that you could think of. I used to do that too, but it's actually nicer when you use a little restraint with that, so the descriptions that you keep shine out all the more. You're a really good writer though =]

[Calypso]

Cute!

[SOUL LESS]

You're becoming repetitive...galaxies and mathematical proof and science. This is much better than the spoken word. You should write prose more often I suppose. :)
I really can't figure out how to review this; great though process, nice comparisons, vivid imagery. That just about sums it up i guess :)
About the theme; You pick a little from everyone you meet. Some never really leave you. :)
It deserves a rating...even though i detest judging.