I.

Broken words are scattered
across the ground.
The promise hangs in tatters,
and the hoops of steel
have come unbound.
With far too much too near to feel,
and not the guts to still be flattered,
those fine-spun dreams have come unwound,
and that same web is worn and battered.
This same old Earth beneath our heels
is stained with tears and resolutions never found,
and she the shoulder where we cry and try to heal.
Her beauty is as transient as love,
and yet the twain compel us fools to kneel.


II.

He brings it on a silver platter,
and she relishes the meal.
Now the sauce of it is splattered
all across her once-white gown,
and around his heart it forms a seal
admitting none but she whom he has crowned.
And it was she who sang the notes when his dreams shattered,
and now the silence is almost surreal--
but she prefers it to the sacrilege of sound.

And what of dreams if from one web they reel?
Then does one spider drink their blood and gulp them down?
Some say dreams are juggled by a clown
and when he slips, into the ring they clatter--
to be carried down a hole by some mad hatter.
Others hold that dreams are cards the muses deal,
and woe to him on whom the fates have frowned.
It seems that dreams are hunted by the hounds
of prosperity and things that are not real.

But this girl clings to things that cause her heart to pound
and still believes that hope cannot be bound.
And nothing can destroy the dreams that matter,
for they flow from One beyond this blue-green round.
Dreams explode when mortals try to tie them down--
still they blindly rope and box them with such zeal
and chafe at aches and bruises all around.
There is much in life that perpetually confounds:
How can one know and safely handle love?