Poetic fingerprints

Years back I met someone extraordinary
And discovered poetry.
I wrote poems.

Once, books ago, I fell in love.
Words swirled inside of me
Dancing a mad whirl-a-gig
Shaping a life of their own
Like birds joyfully flying in an updraft.

As love slid somewhere between worry and distance
Words melted to tears, falling silently
Adding salt to a thousand oceans
Or at least one.

After rejection,
Routine and reality completed the work
Blurred my nouns
Eradicated my verbs
Turning my mind against me.
A foreign language seeped from my mouth.

Yet, my eyes could see.
Photographs became the voice of my soul
Trying to reach out
As if vision could communicate more than words.

Now lightheartedly abandoned and forgotten
Indifference celebrating its victory at every turn
My eyes look but no longer see.
I search who and what I am.

Through this dense wasteland of fog
No horn blows to trace the way
No lighthouse calls up to me
No body floats to point to the wreck
But some tiny rips of parchment
Their ink faded like dying memories.

Penelope on the sea searching for Ulysses
While he wallows with Circe
Encounters ghostly sirens muted by her presence
Their long fingers grappling at the disintegrating
White flakes of paper.

I will not abandon this ship.
Alone on my drifting vessel
Without expectations
I will let the visions guide me
Wherever they will.

I will imagine little self-contained haikus
Like messy fingerprints left by children
Or undecipherable rebuses to be pondered.
Like my poems.

Here my faded words to those who betray
And forget with appetite and without remorse
Leaving the deep water well nearly dried.

Here my photographs to those who love me unconditionally
With or without sight
With or without words
With my messy images
and the foreboding rich-toned colours that inhabit my head
With those childish fingerprints all over my life.

P.S. To my most extraordinary someone who is still patiently around,
my future poems and a hug or two... or three.