A poem built around an Evan’s Blue Song.

Within this shelter, your beating heart will be a bomb
(waiting to explode); instead of him, her, or me,
your rhetoric will be because of your enemy’s fractured heart
thudding inside their cracked rib cage.

You have written yourself off as a casualty of this war
(a hostage of this situation), and you swear
there is no way to leave this war zone, unharmed, unscathed.

(Yet, somehow, you declare the scene a happily ever after ending.)

Your beating heart demands fireworks (flashbangs with brilliant colors). My heart has always begged for pyrotechnics (as though it was crafted to create a show).

Cling to your memories, baby.

As the hours tick onward, you’ll be as distant as that far-off town you call home.

Release the demons you swallow because my memories are accessories, and my heart is a hostage to the situation.

Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.

My cherished self-pity is the refrain to that song we knew all the lyrics to.

How insignificant is this movie scene to the overall effect of the montage.

How trivial.

& yet, it’s all we can think about for days.

This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home,

and we’re counting bits of broken glass as though they’re stars.

We’ve made our bed, as they say, and now we must lie in it.

Even as the broken glass scratches, leaving scars – hopeless reminders of rainy nights and car crashes.

Your memories constellate at this exact moment in time (where time stops having any meaning whatsoever).

I have to ask.

How can you bear witness to what you saw & still manage to crack a smile, darling?

Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear all these years later like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.

Your energy is hemorrhaging, losing consciousness with each passing minute.

Your cigarette cologne is a scent you wear
after all these years
like a weapon, like an aphrodisiac.

Your beautiful energy is hemorrahging,
losing consciousness with each passing minute.

My cherished self-pity is a memoir that fell in the rain. Warped all the pages. Ink is left smudged.

Cling to your memories.

This scene is a car crash on a rainy night home.

You’re a distant, far-off city.

We’ll stick to singing melodies of a song we all know. No cherished self-pity in the refrain. I’ll continue to remind you of graveyards & ancient tombstones, of fire escapes, and of long-abandoned lecture halls, and quiet libraries

like a ghost

We will sing melodies of a song we all know the refrain to,
yet no one picks at karaoke nights.
I will remind you of graveyards and ancient tombstones,
fire escapes, and long-abandoned lecture halls

like a ghost.

Your beautiful energy is evaporating now. We have made our bed, as they say, now, we must lie in it.

How insignificant is this movie scene.

Isabelle Palerma

with a little help from the boys at Evan’s Blue for some inspiration when I was struggling with a block.