Dead men don't whistle, not even in the dark. And there are some offences, Monsieur, that are unforgivable.

And sweeter now, and sadder still, the lovers' glance has passed away

That undenied beneath the sky means to find another day.

Oh hideous, the clockwork child with painted smile would try to be alive - she'll press a phantom lover close and watch him disappear - like smoke, the cigarettes she holds so carelessly as if she were a living thing! She cannot sing since her words are nought but she'll dance upon her strings; she's a puppet, after all, and she hides away her heart of glass when other puppets call.

And just like life, a tear might form behind the painted eye and just like death her breath escapes in some melancholy sigh.

I only wanted to love you (not for you to see me in return)

from far away

where I cannot touch

and slowly quicken the death of a heart.

But never breathing.

In some kind of quiet melancholy, the leaves seem to drift in shadows.

And the season passes without a word, soundless like the trees that watch over me, shedding colored tears - lonely confetti, for the carnival that never came. Bright against the storm-grey sky, each oak sags beneath the pressing clouds that seem so out of reach, and crowned in gold they bathe in the tainted light that belongs to an ancient day.

And the heart that will die with the sun.

And dr - drop - dripping like the saddest rainstorm you ever saw, weeping beautiful poetry to fall gently and damp upon my upturned face.

Lying on the road lined with wrought-iron gaslights, claimed by the yesterdays that refuse to return, I only wish that I could sink into the kaleidoscope dream - that sweet and sanguine nightmare that kisses my shoulder and leaves me cold, shuddering in the mourning light, drained of colour,

for it has slipped between the floorboards and underneath the slighted windowframe

And in that drafty room with a view, love sang that fleeting song, the haunting refrain that won't leave me be; a whispered promise that fell out of favour.

Oh I know you

like every other one who used to exist to well in their own grey space.

Something so out of reach, I'm not even going to try - it would be vain to say I could touch you, but if I did, well. I have the ruining touch, darling, and I sure don't want to decay your breathless dance. I don't want to be known, don't want to speak, just want to see

and maybe be seen.

Like a ghost, little phantoms on your fingers, spinning like the erstwhile ballerina I would've been and off, off, off into the...

Hold tight the hope you dare not think! and inside that fleeting innerspace you are.

The quiet creeps inside

  beyond the paper-thin glass windows that, with frailty and fragile futility, slides underneath the whiskey-tainted light.

A heart, sewn together in some kind of haphazard hurry, soon unravels to reveal the real

and there

  it lies

    in compromise and tired sighs.

There is blood no more for the golden idols of your youthful idyll and like dust, shall soon crack and fade into the highland breeze.

The skies have frozen into some kind of grey, and that's the way it stays.

Lying down on the sterile ground, a sad stitching of asphalt and concrete, watching autumn leaves fall sadly slowly and silently to where we used to walk, touching in an instant like a forgotten kiss on your naked shoulder each frayed heartstring that sleeps in dormant stasis now. And for each, a memory flaring up like a newly struck matchstick - disappears, out! out! and leaving the acrid haunting sulphur smoke behind. You know he was here.

Touching souls, touching footsteps, touching lives.

Now let us, in reverent tenderness, encase our hearts in tempered glass. I could not love, suddenly held hostage by the thought of another chance. I can't breathe and I can't feel; if the sun slumbers in fitful quiet somewhere way up high, behind the brooding stormclouds, when will I be able to bleed?

And strangely, where it should hurt - no dull ache, no sharp pains - my absent heart has grown fond of forgetting. Leaving me in moments of awkward unsaid anxiety, when I should exchange my I-love-you's the words dripped away, leaving behind only arsenic and absinthe-tainted infirmity. O pretty carelessness, don't we love how the strongest ties dissolve faster than the breaking surf - buried under seven years of tide.

Fall, the daughters of autumn, and let not the red and gold creep into your unloved beauty,

  I'll take my tea alone, walk through the lonesome ways and watch the doves whisper into some God's punctured thought.

Passion cannot touch the plaintive sleeper.

   And no one shall mourn in clouded melancholy.