And in the end

Rain falls slowly on the caresses you once laid on my cheeks. The memory of your touch shivers my body with helpless longing. To feel, for only a second in this eternity, your body pressed against my soul; To share the passion which overtook me on those moments, in nights long forgotten in life’s current of days, when your eyes met mine in smile. 1

Almost a song now flutters in the pathways of my desire; drowning out all reason, like the wailing of a madman, serenading empty streets on cold winter mornings. I hear its call, clear and blurred; I hug the days in which I heard it, and laughed away the time, only to wake up somberly in a desolate night, wondering where all of the hours have escaped to. Because when all was over, when darkness swallowed all our dreams; when life parted goodbye, and love stood crying, draped in black; When all reality broke like a crystal mirror on the floor, all the hours had disappeared in a curtain of smoke. They departed; feathers of gold in a desert of sparkling sand. 2

And though I cry, and mourn the time which to me once belonged, no weeping turns the hourglass upright. No angel can save my flight from this sudden landing. From the peaks of stars and sun, to the hushed valleys of the night, I descended into this catacomb, leaving the world behind. 3

How can the heavens strike us so! You and me, who shared every breath of love’s flame, and crowded around its ethereal fire. You and me, who spent so many lullabies hanging in each others’ whispers, floating without a care on life’s never-ending sea.4

And now my body twists in sorrow, as the glimpses of that time resurface, like rays of sunrise in the dark blue of midnight’s hour. The first sight I ever curiously fluttered your way, the first stolen kiss you took away. The whirlwind nights, chasing one another’s hopes in the flows of our kisses; your strong hands, along the curves of my hips, on moon swept beaches, on summer dawns. 5

No rain, no tears, no song can sweep away the cuts which now ebb from my conscience. But alas, no life is eternal; immortality is a gift which the Gods hold tight in their mystery. No man survives, and every smile fades, swept away like a tumbleweed on a lonely road. But to say that death had the last word; to say that his cold hand was the last comfort you have ever known; Ah, the ride, alas, has ran its course. There is yet no sunrise to behold in sweet arms. There is yet no mirth to wish upon, no candles to light in hope of magic spells. There is yet no hopeful dove flying towards better days, no olive branch in its beak. Only your surrender, and nothing more.6

And still, the rain cries, drowning out the sound of wind; only my breath speaks, but to disperse like cigarette smoke; but to disappear, like the end of a magic act; to whirl away, like an ancient Arabian dance; to fall, finally dead, among the ashes of a once blazing fireplace, for ever lost in its silence. 7