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
Copyright © Derek Chos | Year Posted 2017
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