With a fire in my heart,
I write love stories that aren't fairytales.
Though beautiful,
fairytales aren't all that magical,
and life just doesn't work that way.

No love story is a happy ever after,
and no love story can ever be real.
Life is full of heartaches, tragedies, and broken promises.
Even if love sticks around,
it never runs that smoothly.

Love is not a highway,
but a cobbled road,
sometimes lonely,
or a tidal wave during a storm,
fighting to pull you under.

Though love is ugly,
it too is beautiful.
Love can endure the worst.
Illness, temptation, anger, and a sadness no one wants to bare.
It's stronger than anything,
and more solid than most.
It casts out fear,
and defeats hate.
It's what I write about.
The good and the bad.

As Atlas attempted to seize the heavens
he learned to bare the weight of the world.
Such is the cruel fate
of love to scorn turned.

And what of all the legends of old,
of hero's tales from bronze to gold.
Why instead of stone statues
are cement hearts held
in every man's chest
while we lay old stories to rest?

The songs of sirens
swapped for plastic promises,
Heads of hydras
exchanged for two faced friends
as our magic morphs to cheap tricks,
all that managed to remain
Is an Achilles heel for sincerity

So when two souls like worlds collide
and create a place of bliss,
too often one bares the weight
of both worlds, with the burden
of unrelenting loss.

Your name wrung
between the lines of
fresher tender cuts.
Brushing a slower finger
over dusty pages,
disturbing untold stories
that was long untouched.

Your name is
the tap-tap of hammer nails
and the crimson consummator.

The barricading name,
of the mesmeric temple of apologies
molded by unequivocal agony and anger
lying in the bleak moor
laced with your remnants.

My mind is left shambled on the floor,
shards of memories
now leaking as exudate
am I being inflamed?

If I were to paint this across the canvas,
it’d be red, blue then purple
a galaxy with mismatched constellations
on a rippled fabric of night skies.

If I were to ink you to paper,
tracing you in black
you’d diffuse, cry and leak
into a pool of red,
dripping at the edge of the paper.

You are the cactus
pricking with every temptation.

The one engrained in my figmentation
wrapped in lessons
coloring the pigmentation of my skin
with various hues.

You are the open wound
with the fabricated scab.

You are the name
that rings inside my head,
echoing through my memories
trembling shakes, tremors
through the cronies
widening the past a little
more within me.

I walked into life's library to seek perhaps adventures there.
Not really knowing what I sought my expectations unaware.

I looked first at the non-fiction upon shelves marked clearly with tape.
The more I looked yet did I realize it was from that I sought escape.

I chanced upon a section where great imagined dramas did abound.
Where mystic stories and strange creatures on the pages could be found.

Caught briefly by the imagined on the pages with heroes deeds upon.
I realized all was fantasy so through the pathway of books I ventured on.

Time passed as it tends by some scale that seemed so erratic in its flow.
As shelves and stories passed me by along the route I chose to go.

I came then to a section with a long queue of people standing there.
Patiently in their place and each with determined and focused stare.

What was it that drew them and caused this lengthened line?
Their looks suggested that the need, was very much like mine.

I had passed so many shelves with random people here and there.
But no other shelf or section for which this queue I could compare.

Through strong and strange compulsion I resolved to take my chance.
To join the much sought after line toward the shelf of "Love and Romance".