Each night a man writes in silence
His pen a lantern to his soul retreat
The pages hold his vanished spring
A lover long dissolved in time deceit

He does not write of now or today
But of ghosts who wore soft perfume
Of touches imagined that slipped away
His diary a blooming padded room

He never signs his name at all
The ink is shy like birds in fall
He writes as if the words could speak
But paper answers no one’s call

Sometimes he draws her face in ink
Not as she was but how she seemed
Each line a prayer that starts to sink
In rivers only he has dreamed

His sentences burn with silent ache
Not love but shadows love once cast
He drinks from lips that never spoke
And feeds on poems of the past

Though silence wraps the world around
He plucks her sighs from empty air
Though truth may fall without a sound
The ink still keeps her beauty there

His mind a garden of decay
Where old perfume begins to rot
Where laughter limps and fades away
And passion lingers though forgot

The night is cold the ink is thin
He writes for love that never was
From wounds that hide beneath the skin
He bleeds in silence just because

Yet he is vast and so is pain
His diary stitched with loss and skin
Each word a blade in fields of rain
Each page a soul he holds within

He writes because he cannot choose
To let her go would be to die
To hold her close a kind of bruise
He lives where truth and dreaming lie