I once penned poetry tantamount to arias and flowed like symphonies. The emotions were palpable, sometimes almost overwhelmingly so; even my prose was prolific and profound. No matter what I wrote, there was always an abundance.

If I felt sad, the beauty of a delicate teardrop could not eclipse the outpouring of the cavalcade of sighing sorrows. Happiness never was solely that. Joy seeped and soaked into every stanza as if I had drizzled my tongue with honey while the harvest bees droned smartly from vivid metaphor on through thick and throaty alliteration, punctuated by bouts of often sexy sliding slap and perfect purring pouts, oscillating around the onomatopoeia carousel.

Still, what I miss the most is the subtle watercoloured portraits of life and love surreal and sublime, often a spilled dreamscape by design, for that is what wishing and waiting for love could draw from me. Isn’t a heart unable to contain the secrets of delectable desires and tantalizing taboo, supposed to endow the pleasures it keeps upon the treasure it seeks?

My words now bump and tumble awkwardly, jumbling into a fumbling heap, poetry scrambling like a clumsy ax felling a deadened tree. ‘Timbre’, I’d cry if the words weren’t so dry, before they splintered and fell off cowardly. If only you knew how painful that fall was, a stanza shrouded in rhyme. As quickly as it poured forth from my weakened mind, you’d know that the words in my heart are quite simply p(r)aying for time. 😔

©️ Beatriz Esmer