A night to remember
For some to forget
Final place of solace
A life time of regret
Seeking inner peace
Putting an end to the pain
Carry me to comfort
A final solution is what you seek my friend
Hold me and never let go
It’s a small price to pay for a healthy soul
Tell me I’m loved
I rather keep the truth to play it safe
It’s more than enough
It’s all I can take

I am having writer's block
and experiencing all this anger
and hunger and love and regret,
I feel like I just don't have a bowl
for all these incredible feelings.
I just don't have enough respect for words anymore.
I want to make a cake out of this psychedelia
and I don't even have a sweet tooth.
Where do I put all of it?
Not how.... where?
I feel like drinking water without pills is vain.
Air left in my stomach
makes my mind a ****** stalker
who'll chase you down the road
suddenly have concussions and die in front of you
and make you call the police for a whole new different reason.
Writer's block is ghost town
and I am still human without a soul.
How to die beautifully?
Perhaps when the sun shines the brightest in the dusk
burning everyone more than ever.

Ghost kisses across my skin, scars
You dream you can save me
I'm made of stars, they burn bright,
Say love can save me, be the one thing that won't hurt
Only self love can save me and I'm content to have the memory of notes unsung,
Of nights unspent,
Of kisses too long ago to have had,
to be burnt

Never fall in love with a poet.
They will break you apart
like stanzas.
You are a metaphor,
a simile, an oxy-
*****.
Never fall in love with a poet.
They will tear you apart
like a rough draft,
burn you, and then
call it art.

© A. Leigh

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.


translated by W.S. Merwin