by Sean Portland

Created on: August 19, 2009   Last Updated: August 22, 2009

Empty hallways swell and shrink and swell,
their only consonance; a series of rose-tint light bulbs
repeating their rouge tones through a protracted black siphon,
weighting the narrow distances
like masterless sentinels.

The silence is acute as to be the chime of inwardness;
a sadly beautiful cipher.
I wish I could share it with the peppered moths
that fritter their space away
and perish.

These walls, they taunt me so.
On sorrel blocks that grain the surface -
a faded paper climate,
a smirched mirage of flowered meadows,
and the clearness, I so yearn.

Handprints smear the eggshell sky,
a thousand stories never told.
But each proclaim, with shrieking echoes;
the hands were never held.

I am among them.
I know I am among them.

But as the bluebells lean and sway in vertigo,
as though in broad and breezy fields,
the bricks dissolve to faint horizons.

For a moment, I am free.

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