The strangest apparition, so rare and so refined
Are your words, like winter's branches, with their pained and pointed lines

Have I a foolish heart, holding fragile dreams of glass?
For within your peculiar gaze hide tender ghosts of lovers past

Your quick and nimble fingers bleed with every careful strum
But the bones of hapless prey rattle softly in your drum

The heathen kings that rule the darkest corners of your mind
Have fondled all the muses and drank all the jester's wine

My able pen scratches the lines of your cherub face
Around your eyes I draw the lies and focus of the chase

The autumn branches rustle, I sit here waiting to receive
Your words that lie beneath their twisting, frail, and brittle leaves

-C