A Romantic History, In Orbit

I.

I have killed myself with love,
Swooned to a romantic suicide
Over seven weeping years.
A slave to raving emotion,
Cupid has often paralysed me
With bee stings to the heart.

A muggy coma under which all gazes
Seem laced with stars
And each smile that befalls me
Is a petal in my palm, crushed
Like the hopes I bear and wear.
What hope then is there now?

II.

The first latent twitchings
Erupted in the well-read child
As she sought that love
Which poets wrote of
And that God told her was good.
Well, it was a travesty here

Of sense. What ten year old
Dreams truly, or meaningfully?
That first thread in the tapestry
Was sewn in a blind panic
Which never calmed itself;
A chaotic scene to behold.

III.

Two years passed, a void of feeling,
When that anonymous figure
Suddenly turned around amidst
A tsunami of something. Grasping
For words to describe it, 'love'
Fit the jigsaw, just about.

As the amnesiac recovers memories
Ripped at the seams, so too did I
After thirty months had left me
A shell, devoid of everything
I had lost from my unrequited addiction
To a drug which quietly mocked me.

IV.

Midway through this time, I felt
The indigestion he must have felt
When another, bloated by their passion,
Selfishly suffocated their beloved.
For one head's fiery fuzz
Covered an ill-starred judgement

Which had been fated by his roving eyes
As they froze in orbit on me.
Bewildered, the deer flees the hunter,
And the hunter desires it all the more,
Yet the deer throws him to the ground
And winds him - rips his childish faith.

V.

Freed from chains of my stale vacuum
After five half turns of this orb,
I leapt to compensate by fulfilling
Offers winking with possibilities.
But in making a Muse out of me,
He made a tyrant: foolish with power,

Drunk on divinity, egotistical
On a lonely whim, he grew tired
Of the flamboyance of a bit part.
Overthrown by an underling, a reek
Of sour milk perpetrated proceedings
As a haughty heart dusted itself off.

VI.

Aloof, I hid in my heavens,
Poisoning myself as an antidote
Against further hurt and humiliation.
But a flaw in my plan crept in,
Unnoticed, muttering Scottish,
Until the chasm in my chest quaked.

My knees had been weak before.
My mouth had trembled with utterances
So ludicrously inane, they burned
In their silence, but never before
Had such melancholy supped at me.
Alas, her name was not mine. I fell.

VII.

As I, the ignored, entreated Venus,
Some wintry infection stiffened me
And a blearily-lit street went dark.
The snow had blinded me before -
Gleaming, a lethal carpet of crystals -
But stumbling in the dark was far worse.

As the sun fed a tentative spring again
An obstacle obscured my way home.
I tried to grasp it, rotting in parody,
An anachronism from younger years
But rationality held me upright
And showed me new neighbourhoods.

VIII.

Overwhelmed under gleaming statues,
A shadow cloaked me in anonymity
Until I threw off my guises for a god.
Or, at least, he seemed like a deity -
Much was celebrated and worshipped of him,
And I took my place, fawning, at the front.

False idolatry! My gifts were not golden enough
And his pride gave him a false platform
On which to balance certain dreams
Which did not flower the next winter.
But at that time, I was tarnished
By distance, and mediocrity, and potential.

IX.

At that time, I passed over some joke;
Derisory of his qualities, lathering him
In the distinction of owning a comedy
Far beyond any wit. Sincerity is often
The greatest amusement to the cruel.
But as I gazed back upon the ashes

(As Lot's wife looked at Sodom and Gomorrah
And, for her troubles, was immortalised in salt)
I realised I had missed a turning
And the birds tweeted merrily, the flowers
Blossomed under a sun unbeknownst 'til now
As foreign as Chinese was this emotion.

X.

Not love - no love can be borne, when
It is borne out of a recalculation of sense.
But still the summer of my days played out
Amongst glitter-dashed nights and misty days,
Exploring, like infants, the playground
Of fondness. Boundaries were found, and

In time, lines were drawn. Battle lines
Became blurred in the ensuing months,
Until there were no lines between us
And venom made me woozy with revulsion
For lapsing into idiocy, on occasion.
Summer abandoned us, stranded in a cold park.

XI.

As the sun faded, a new dawn broke;
In front of year-worn tears, it was truly new.
No hidden trapdoors fouled my path,
Just the fear of despoiling perfection.
So crisp and untouched he was - is -
A garden of Eden, raw with piety.

Unlike those years past, I did not chase
The dawn. I sat and watched it
As it flared up prettily with blooms
And stems and orchards crowned it
And he glowed with youth's sweet abundance.
But my eyes hurt with the shimmer of goodness.

XII.

My orbit slows, like lazy seconds
As they drip idly off a pocket-watch.
The stars, previous wonders, are dull
And wizened with a bored familiarity.
What, then, is this flame-pocked art before me -
So simple, yet so devastatingly alluring?

Mistakes weave the man. Beautiful sins
Line up within me, put sparkles in my worn eyes
As they watch me career forth
Into the unknown. But your eyes are as godly
As any planet encountered and adored before,
And thus, my orbit centres around you, now.