How Do I Love Thee?

My soul fell silent but my pen still demands

Satisfaction for my tongue’s transgressions and

My heart’s conspiracy against my mind’s sanity,

How could you be so childish as to put your faith’s clarity

Into an Odyssey of color? An artistic fallacy

Simplistic in all its depth and rich in frantic malady.

All the wisdom, peace and light of sages fall short,

Of treating symptoms of that austere sort,

For all what sages do is to touch the mind,

You see, mind’s nothing to do with diseases of that kind,

All its power, so overrated by the world, tumbles down

At the sight of so much as your beloved’s frown,

So what is the use of pens when the soul is mute?

Even when my heart bears enough of fruit

To feed the whole lot of Africa for centuries ahead,

And still I leave them to rot under my bed,

They turn black slowly, like the inside of my skin,

They lose their volume like my patience running thin,

And sin? Of all the reasons, why has god created sin?

For girls like me to run to, at the sight of every lost win?

For men’s decisions to seem relevant? For the whim

To be more meaningful? For our imaginations to swim

In oceans deep without of the fear of losing breath?

You know imagination dies the moment it senses death,

But not mine, I’ve reached for death willingly so many times,

It has been a most prominent theme in my rhymes

Since I first died at the hands of a fleeting knight

Who lost his place in the kingdom and rode out of sight,

And ever since he disappeared, I’ve died for all the same

Reasons, the same tunes, and I’m the one to blame,

Even though they had all the weapons sharp and ready,

It’s my fault entirely for making their hands so steady,

In the process of my slaughter, on the altar of daymares,

At the feet of happily ever after, now at the feet of a pier,

And how do I love thee? Let me count the ways,

I love thee in the dreams of the sun, and when the moon prays,

I love thee like a stream of light with all the universe’s stars

Wrapped inside it and rushing to its cage’s invisible bars

To expand then implode in colors never discovered and

I love thee with the color in painter’s eyes and poet’s hand,

I love thee with the passion of witches for hidden nature,

And got them burned by the fire of the same creature,

Consumed, ashes to ashes, ashes back to earth,

And whatever ends in earth must look upon a rebirth,

So ashes to ashes, love, I know I’ve said it before,

Go unheard of, go free, go captured underneath the floor,

My love is not for owning, it’s for my poetry alone,

My soul if not for yearning, would’ve turned to stone.