Static

It was a cold and biting night
As I donned my plastic sandals
And ventured into the bite
With a fire in my heart

One heated with my own wrong
Furnished with the fuel
Of a thousand unsaid apologies, long
Burning inside of me.

I flipped open the phone;
She picked up the invisible line
And I poured out my heart, slown
Only by the crests of time.

We both made small talk.
Ideas picked here and there
Jobs, weather, all flopped
Clumsily through the speakers.

Then... static.

For minutes at a time.

Nothing but a null signal.

Floated through the cold.

She told me I was missed.
I told her I missed her back.

Then, static again.
Frightening, quiet static.
As if the electrons themselves
Were afraid to move.
And, instead, whispered quietly amongst themselves.

The girl on the line;
My girl on the line
Was completely absent.
No familiar, happy words,
Not even the sound of a breath.
Just that ever-present, ever-frightening static.

Where did you go, Stephanie?
I missed you.
And not just your body or your mind.
I miss your warm tones over the speaker
Which were replaced by static.

Light

The room was cold and empty
And dark with nothing but a screen
Lighting up the shell of a person
So certain in his self-conviction.

He cooled down and his throat dried.
And his breathing slowed as his fingers
Froze. Unable to move.
And he turned his eyeballs inside his head.
And saw nothing.

Nothing that could inspire
Such wonder-filled
words.

Despite his greatest hiding of the truth
Some light shown through.
Through the cracks it shone
And in the darkest corners.
It shone. That despite everything,
She was willing to say that he was wrong.

She was willing to serve as the exception
In a pefectly constructed system of artifice
Designed to deceive even himself.

No, the poet was not dead.
He was suffocating.

The once optimistic hero
Ruined by reality never died.

They were trapped
By his choice.
By the barriers constructed by
A man trying to escape pain.
By choices made in mad, animalistic
Fear. Isolating himself from himself.

And so the poet told him to write.
And the optimist slowly stirred.
As the tears welled up in his eyes,
He realized this was inspired... by her.