Once Upon A Time...

there was a painted face goth boy

with a big red smile drawn on

& eyes rimmed in midnight coal...

He met a hot young sailor boy on line;

they fell hard...

They fell so hard they were out of control...

They brused one another

& they kissed

& they cried...

They started, but parted,

they knew they had tried...

The words became silence

& the flowers - they died...

And so these splintered songs

are all we have that survived...

For the hearts of the lovers

were broken & bleeding;

a mass of painfully raw roughened edges...

But the boy with the tear

stained face lifted the shattered

remains of their still beating hearts

& recorded their haunting siren song

so that the sailor boy who sailed away

might understand

how complex

how beautiful

how wondrous was their love affair -

& how even now -

those fragments could tell the story of a love

born in innocence...

& tempered by heartbreak...

a love that would never be forgotton

& would therefore

never know death.

- For Travis -