Sayonara, Year of Stagnation

Ever free to traverse my world Yet shackled to an eleven year old promise I donned a platinum cloak atop a living mountain Physically high, emotionally low I held two pairs of hands While my heart beat out a painful rhythm A handshake that formed my first friendship And a typed message that united two lovers The grayest skies I've ever seen Sheltered my screens from the sun's glare Thousands of miles away Cherry and Lime linked across the expanse A month of birth and traditions Lay in shattered pieces under my triumphant body Barely lucid and smelling like a bar I held the sun in one hand and victory in another The strongest scores I'd seen in decades Danced on a melting page in the summer heat An old acquaintance left as a master And in came trouble and a new air conditioner Ungodly hot and disconnected from the Expanse I sat in three prisons with only them to guide me Ever hungry, ever bored, ever exhausted I ripped victory from the warden's clammy hands Finally free to bask in the summer sun I immediately hid in a dark, familiar cave The winds of love began to whisper in the rustling leaves As I smiled at the screen I knew as them I returned to a place I romanticized as Nirvana Six years later and a completely different man That world was smaller than I ever imagined Yet meant more to me then than it ever had before Pulling the first of my overtime hours I stopped caring about the work that must be done My stomach growled and my shorts fell off Sleep-deprived and starving for whatever scraps there were Immobile once more, the world began forming around me Future roads, unbreakable connections, pitch-black voids The world and all of its frightening futures slipped away from me And with it, the rest of the year A dusk enshrouded airport brought them to me The lover who saved me from past year's poems As their world and body enveloped me My aches, woes, scars and tumors melted in their embrace With a new fire lit inside me Stoked by anxiety, despair and hope I don a new cloak of coffee-brown and boom-pole black And shout into the Expanse once again to open my world