No Tears Left

 

You need not shed a tear for me again,

For I have spent my eyes upon your name;

Our dreams were snatched like flesh by circling wings,

And I beat my skull against fate’s dark wall.

I never heard your footsteps leave my shore,

Nor saw you cross the threshold of my home;

You sailed away to seek another door,

While I was drowning, thinking you would come.

A little stream once whispered through my life,

Like silver silk beneath a tender moon;

It carried dreams as fragile as spun glass,

And sang your name beneath the summer moon.

But now that stream has swollen into wrath,

A blackened river tearing through its bed;

It drags the roots of everything I loved,

Like corpses from the grave of yesterday.

The whirlpools spin like mouths that hunger still,

The waves rise tall as walls around my chest;

Yet nothing in their fury frightens me-

A heart already drowned can fear no death.

Uprooted trees come crashing through the flood,

Their branches clawing at my broken head;

They strike like memories that refuse to die,

While nameless shadows gather where I bled.

The fish now feast upon my hollow eyes,

And leave them pale as pebbles washed ashore;

No tears remain beneath those vacant lids-

The river has drunk every drop and more.

My chest floats on, a rootless piece of wood,

Like driftwood abandoned by the tide;

Below my ribs, where once a warm heart beat,

The river keeps its restless beasts inside.

Then suddenly, beneath the drowning sky,

Your stone-set ring still catches one last flame;

A dying star upon my finger glows-

The final spark that still remembers you.

The crows descend like fragments of the night,

Their beaks like knives around the fading stone;

They circle, quarrel, tear the air apart,

As though even your last gift is not my own.

I have no face remaining left to smile,

The mirror searches for me like a blind man;

You stand before me, stranger as the rain-

You cannot find the one you used to know.

So why should I save my tears for you,

Like clouds hoarding rain above a dead sea?

The flood of fate  has carried every dream away;

What once was you is now a ghost to me.

Go on. I will not call you back again.

The river has forgotten where you stood.

I have no tears left to give your name-

Only this endless water, dark with blood.