A tribute: I find hope in the beating breast

I find hope that gives me rest

I had no desire to love her. No desire to hold her. No real need for her slightly deformed beauty in my life. So I pulled her closer. Like I had done for days now.

We sat and thought and rarily talked because frankly the sound of her voice frightened me. I thought that, if I could sleep, I wouldn't think of her so much. I would hold her warmth next to mine and close my eyes and see the beauty I was searching for.

But it never happened that way. I was never transported in my waking dreamlike state to a place where the one I really longed to hold reappeared.

No. This one was skinny and beautiful and thought herself much more graceful and useful than she really was. She thought that when she gently leaned in and kissed my cheek that I were, in a way, melting for her. But the sighs I breathed were sorrowful and sour and full of a sad sensation. The sensation of loss. The stinging that comes when you know you ruined the only good thing you ever had.

But she seemed to enjoy it. When I would hold her, she would coo softly. When I would turn her forehead to kiss it gently and wait for a response she would search my face for an empty space and plow me over with a fresh dewey kiss.

It was nothing. It was nothing compared to her sweet naivety. To the moments when I would see the uncertainty in her eyes and reassure her with a kiss or a smile or just a wink or a tear. It was nothing compared to those breathless moments we spent together. There was no light behind her eyes. No youthful charm. No wisedom beyond her need.

It was nothing.

I had left the only thing that ever meant everything to me and ended up with nothing.

And even the resoulution in knowing that it was over and that it would never return didn't quiet my racing mind when I set to think about her for a while. I tried. I tried to lift my head and not think of her. I tried to draw breath and not dream of her. I tried to drive and not see her, sitting next to me, her soft brown hair awash in the gentle yellow wind of the sunshine, and her bright green eyes always searching, always asking, always looking to me to direct her to some far off deer or begging me to speak in a silent expression "I love you more than life and even that isn't enough!"

It isn't enough.

And I sleep and I dream and I see her now running from me, now fallen and hurt, now swimming in a tumultuous cerulean sea, now bent over a stream washing her feet with mud and laughing at the tadpoles, now chasing a small babe with blue green eyes as changing as the sea and a tight brow and large red cheeks and dusty brown hair and I think- Oh how I think- Is it real? Is this maybe the reality and perhaps the nightmares is this lonely thing I wake up to in my arms? This skin and bones dark woman I know well and hate as equally well?

But no.

Nothing could be so well. So true. So free.

Because I am Young John. And nothing was ever so good that I couldn't ruin it.

And, as I awake to the sad grey dim of the television set and shove her off of my weak chest; as my dreams fade and everything becomes all too real again, my hope dies.

Well the voices fall like timber, and the fear it pours like rain. And my heart is crushed to cinders underneath this kind of pain. There is no resolution when the revolution's dead so I'm left with no solution for the voices in my head.