Verseless Verses

I’ve been busy writing you a song.  It’s a song that you inspired.  Each time you speak to me I’m entranced and each time you touch my hand euphoric.  The weight and pull in my chest aches for expression.  A melody strummed coarsely on the strings and a voice that smooths the tune.  Not quite beautiful, not quite perfect, but the song will be yours.  You will hum the notes to be happy, sigh the bars and be sad.  Fly through the prism of our love and experience all.  The good times and the worst.  You will feel me with you in every sprinkled high and every booming low.  My song for you is a great river, flowing slowly through you with implacable force.

Unfortunately, though, as you know, I’m no musician.  I don’t know my bars and I don’t know my chords.  I can’t write down one dot, one flag, one rest.  The pages in your piano books are written in code.  An opera in a foreign tongue.  The beauty experienced but indecipherable, mysterious.  I cannot understand, much less express.  The guitar saves its echoes and the piano its deepest beat.  The maestro is dumb, and his hands are tied.  I’ve been writing you this song, but it remains unwritten.  I’ve been composing a symphony, but cannot begin.  Witless I sit with blank page, blank thoughts, no music, and nothing to do but wail out a noise from the crack in my chest where you’ve been pulling.

Without a song, you deserve at least my words.  I’ve begun a poem in your name, for your love, one to be more treasured than any classical lines you’ve known.  The old greats have lost their power over time, impotence with age and an impersonation of our vitality.  Your love conjures a collection of words, of thoughts and images, so powerful and so unrestrained.  Bursting like fireworks in my brain onto the page in a rainbow of colorful strokes and stanzas.  Each metaphor bears the substance of emotions twice the combined weight, entangled in the complexity of you.  But my love’s mass rips through the thin sheets and destroys the verse.  Or it would if I could get the words out of the pen.  I shake it.  I store it upright waiting to put these to page.  Still waiting.

I’m sorry.  You deserve art.  You are art.  But my skillless fingers and rigid lips cannot express you.  Simply you.  Yours are the verses.  Yours is the song.  Mine is the glory of experience, not expression.  I give you nothing, and begin to lose even what I had.