I Loved A Girl

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you…I could walk through my garden forever.”

— Alfred Tennyson

Fin

No more love No more poems No more hearts No more souls

No more sticks No more stones No more splints No more bones

No more bricks No more walls No more mines No more yours

No more tears No more loss No more fears No more gods

No more graves No more rows No more wars No more jokes

No more needs No more wants No more sex No more cunts

No more slack No more ropes No more deaths No more ghosts

No more breaths No more goals No more dreams No more hope

No more sleep No more thoughts No more thoughts No more thoughts

Embrace the dark Till the new day's begun There's always the dawn Always the sun

--- 30-4-2025, M.A. Tempels © Napowrimo 30: Always the sun

She rests in the arms

of a man who cannot feel her storm,

while I drown

in the flood she left behind.

I feel like a spider,

strung with longing,

spin webs from torn ribs

to catch the ghost of her smile.

Her laugh...

a blade I swallow each morning,

thanking it

for the pain.

I would tear the stars

from the throat of the heavens

just to watch her eyes

glimmer one more time.

My love is not gentle,

it is blood and bone and burning rope.

It is sleepless nights

stitched with screams

no one hears.

This is love,

where I am the pyre

and she,

the flame

that never stays

but never dies.

-Cyrus K.

She believes she knows my ache,

she thinks she understands my sorrow,

because once, she too was broken.

My pain is

a slow implosion,

a daily funeral

with no mourners,

a storm I must swallow

so she may walk beneath clear skies.

She remains with another,

while I cradle her chaos in the dark,

I try hold her world steady,

bleeding in silence,

so she never sees the stain.

Quietly tearing at the seams

just to keep her whole.

I laugh when I want to scream.

I smile so she can cry.

I disappear so she can shine.

And each day,

I wake inside a coffin

just to hold her hand.

This doesn't feel like love.

This is a man burning

so she may feel warm,

and never knowing

that the smoke

is me.

-Cyrus K.

2 April, 1937 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

The woven silk of

Silence, petals fluttering

A delicate day

And the world is wavering

Between soft kiss and collapse

I am not trapped.

I am abandoned.

There is no fight left in my limbs

no fire left in my chest

Only the heavy, sinking knowledge

that I have lived too long

in a body that was never mine to keep.

I do not recognize this face

these hands,

this voice that cracks like old pavement

every time I try to speak

I used to scream for help.

Now I don’t even bother whispering

No one listens to a woman

who dug her own grave.

I do not believe there is a more dangerous and destructive force in all the world than hope, but I do not believe there is a more necessary or perfectly beautiful one either.

Tyler Knott Gregson