One Last Story

Whispered laughs in a smile half hidden,

He lingers, he fills the spaces that words

Didn’t

Throb, hard enough like the beating heart

Of which one feels so much a part, but the other,

Apart—

Among the stories yearning to be heard,

In this bed lies a word not

Stirred.

Tell me one story, the last one before you go

Tell me of the one you may or may not know.

Across the seas, under the sun

There strayed an uncrowned King, naked and undone.

Cast from a forgotten seat and half withered stall,

The King’s last knight leaves his weapons on the wall.

The last and lingering patriotism to which his melancholy now sung,

That once burned strong and passionate when all his world was young,

Whimpers now under that enormous golden fire,

Dimming slowly like the thrones of all the Empire.

Holding his head up for a flag of all the free,

The King looks across and begins riding to the sea.

In this bed now these words they stirred

The calmness of a hurricane, by time, inured.

The outside rain trickles as music to solemn minds,

Each slow pulse a blurring of the blinds.

The King mounted his horse and now he faces the sea;

But he stalls for a moment, he looks back to see

Her plastered pain, the Urn of a Grecian melancholy:

Before you leave, can you tell me—