I remember the days without your songs,

when every step was an elegy for the world.

I mocked the shallow shelters

of the heart, tossed down so easily by gusts

of emotion, while beneath me, the twisting quicksand

of my cynicism grasped at my ankles and pulled me

to a new and peaceful darkness, with safety in in its honesty.

Only a tapping pulse reminded me of life

two fingers, held just so on the wrist.

And to others? They do not know that I am alive.

There were mists around me, always, holding misshapen fears,

while castles morphed and twisted high above me, built of clouds and light,

and dragons wheeled about them in dreams

that haven't changed since the forsaken days of my childhood

Oh, yes, every step an elegy, memories half-asleep and half buried,

in the sand. Hope floats face-down swept down the river,

to the vast ocean, there to be forgotten and re-imagined as a god.

It is the will of man that things beyond our reach are made divine.

I consider the tatters I wear and tear them off my back

casting them to the white-foam currents.

Will those languid, streaming, lifeless tatters be reincarnated?

Or will they simply seek out Hope in the forgotten places and strangle it?

I muse over my madness – my body still trapped in sand.

Am I still as I appear?

A memory of a dream, caught in the reflection, shattered by the impact of a beating heart?

The weight of my despair is measured on the scales of night:

to bring it into the day is to reveal a shard of obsidian,

cracked and fragile, struck through by the hammer-blows of sorrow.

A thousand arrows have pierced me, and I have

been bruised by the slings and arrows of my nightmares.

Soon now, soon, the world will sing again.

The dreams of our noble past remembered, my bitter, broken heart,

in the ferocity held in our will to live. No more shall we be

contained, and chained to sorrows.

No more than the span of weeks and months, the dream of new tomorrows,

when the dawns will be unfamiliar, and joyful for their unfamiliarity.

And you shall see me, black-cloaked and smiling, as cold as death.

Regard nothing of this forsaken soul,

reawakened to the light, standing here at the river

of twisting truths, feet still rooted in the sands.

Yet innocence is found, still, in the purity of ageless wishes

unanchored by time, yet unanswered by fate,

until fate decrees a moment

when I hear the rush of wings.

A soft and gentle sound, yet drowning all else,

as you alight on my shoulder beside the river of sleep and dreams.

Nightingale, sweet nightingale,

you remember me.

Here we may touch, if only a moment,

yet those moments are our deathless eternities,

and such ripples they have sent through our lives already.

Yes, I have upended myself and fallen into that river, hand

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reaching up in a false and halfhearted attempt to be saved,

screaming beneath the surface, as I did not wish to be heard

and found that I could not be understood, no matter what I wished.

But now you are here, and I'm afraid.

I'm afraid that after all this time of screaming beneath the surface

that when I speak, still my voice shall be muffled, drowning

emotions in confused silences, which I made to quicken the death

of dreams.

Unwittingly, I smothered myself, with the memory of pains repeated

causing the fear that they would go on endlessly.

My nightingale, will you forgive me?

If I cannot yet be all that I need to be, will I be allowed to atone?

I have tumbled down the river, and came to a bowl

where a sphinx sits under the water, staring at me

with measuring eyes, asking if I am worthy.

as I drove in my seaward plunge to the infinite.

Nothing will stand between us, but I seek something,

something I tossed into the ocean, along with the madness

of annihilation, when I lost myself and was reincarnated

in the gaunt shape of a fierce black beast.

And as I come up for air and scream my hopes,

I see still how you fly overhead, out of reach,

if only for a moment.

My queen, do you dream of me?

The depths lies before me, and rising from them,

the misbegotten shapes of new worlds,

rising new-forged and spinning

from the surface of silent oceans,

to ascend.

Yet not in these new shivering worlds do I seek the answers -

what I want lies at the bottom of the sea.

How turbulent the journey, how terrible the passage

yet with renewed vigour do I seek it.

For as I gasped for air, I heard your song

and believe that you are singing for me.

And so, now with steely spine,

capable of bearing the weight of a thousand destinies,

I surge into the great unknown, barely noticing

how the sand has been washed away from my feet.

And I ponder at the ironies, as the darkness gathers,

a new and chosen shadow of pelagic depths,

how a zephyr pushed me into that river, a zephyr,

which, I saw, has become a hurricane, almost without my knowledge.

And I plunge into the murk, seeking what I cast away,

with your song in my limbs, filling my lungs with air.

Nightingale, nightingale, do you sing for me?

I have come here, seeking the promise of dissolution

of a life spent buried in the reflection of my other selves.

Would that I had drowned instead.

A tatter of rags floats by me; I seize it and pull it on my shoulders again

the cloak of what I used to me, washed clean by the forgetful

waters of the infinite.

And something glitters far below,

a star that has fallen to shine in the endless night

in the wall-less cellars of the seas.

And that which I'd forgotten

now remembered me, and all that I had thrown away

was revivified in me, that and with a muffled triumphant thrust I knew:

what I had lost had now returned,

and all that was dark before was incandescent again.

And I turn from my hunt downwards, and sought the surface again,

For I knew that in merely seeking it, I'd find it once again.

As I break the surface of the water, I can hear you singing still,

and a smile is on my face, no longer cold and grim.

And as you land upon the waves, and walk upon them,

you transform, into the dirge of my sorrows, into

the hymn of my rebirth. For now all silence is flown,

all nightmares lie forgotten, all fears have been stifled...

and the hatred nascent in me now drowns in the depths below.

Your wings become gentle arms, and they are held out wide

your hair streams behind you on the hurricane of my dreams

Your lips are parted in a shy and gentle smile,

and though you are transformed, made real, the dreamer still remains

For the world with all its wind and endless transformation

is as silent as a stone about me, except for the song you sing.

I pull myself up from the depths, and stride upon the surface:

the river and sands are forgotten, in the expanse of our abyss.

I hold my hand out to you, and on your face I see,

a dream of what we used to have, and how we used to be.

There is beauty in your smile then, and fire in your eyes.

And the words unspoken between us gives me the strength

to hope for a world unclouded by vain hopes and mocking reflections.

I yearn to pull you

into my embrace but when I do,

you shatter into a thousand fragments of darkness, escaping

forever this quiet, empty world.

There is nothing.

There is no one.

In this grey world,

as I lie drowning

at the bottom of the sea,

I remember,

Nightingale,

that you are but a memory,

and I am

alone.