Hold On

The dusted off melody haunted my reverie,

A ghost in the throat of the gale.

I cannot let go of the symmetry,

Or the breath where the harmonies fail.

A broken old photograph, silver and grey,

Floated just beyond my grasp

A floating glimpse of a drowned yesterday,

Caught in a cold, salt-stained clasp.

We tether ourselves on a ship without name,

Where the timber is bitten by brine;

We clung to a broken mast, seeking the flame

Of a light that no longer will shine.

While the angry weather hurls us high,

Up and off lost distant shores,

We trace our ghosts in a charcoal sky,

Past the reach of forevermore.

We hold each other with scratched-out art,

A language of lead and of ink;

You grabbed at my heart with your torn, shredded song,

Just as we started to sink.

All the while drifting, we pulse with the tide,

Caught in a strange, silvered rip

Our shadows entangled, with nowhere to hide,

On the bones of a vanishing ship.

The ink bleeds out where the currents collide,

Tracing lines on a shivering palm

We are the stowaways, nowhere to hide,

In the eye of a ruinous calm.

The Birds of Sunday circle the wreck,

With feathers of velvet and stone,

Waiting for spirits to spill from the deck

And leave all the music alone.

But we are the rhythm that refuses to cease,

A chorus of fractures and light;

Though the Birds of Sunday promise us peace,

We trace the unrest of the night.

With the canvas torn and the colors all bled,

And the riptide pulling us far,

We hold to the song that the living once said,

Underneath a collapsing star.