Love's Beautiful Wilting

When you truly love
How can you truly let go?
The love that made you complete, has left you wholly broken
The healer and the punisher
The passion and the pain
Grows to a late blooming flower
A wilted rose
Sweetness to cover the stench
Beauty to cover the slow poison of decay

Yet were the heart left unbroken
It would never see the light of day
Nor see the change of renewal and re-birth
Had the flower not wilted
It could never have seen the spring come again
The victory is in the defeat
Dying to self to live again
Breaking to be remade

Life and love, the most fragile of things
Cannot be supported by the paper wings of human trust
It can flicker as the last light of a dying summer
Flutter feebly as the butterfly's dying breath
But it cannot sustain

The translucent veins of the heart run through every petal
Every fiber of our being
The breath of existence pounds like a hurricane, cries like the wind
Our being in and a part of
Isolated yet consumed
By the energies and desires that govern our lives

Our dying agony
Our living regret
Our savior and crucifier
Our never-ending lament
Our beautiful melancholy
Our whispered refrain
Our forgotten dreams
And our aching emptiness

Hello, goodbye
Midnight meets morning
Our tortuous healing
And refreshing rain
Never again, once more

Love is a crystal sunrise
That reflects its sparkles onto a dying world
It revives and awakens
Yet hides its thorns beneath its glossy finish