It was okay for a while. Life and death didn’t feel so cruel, and I stopped counting the miles. I remembered love within a smile, walked with my sin down a pink-flowered aisle. Then grey clouds swarmed in and swallowed my sunshine— not because I deserved it, but because water must remain water and wine must be wine. It’s the proper line in a verse that challenges a curse. Let the creative indulgence engulf my soul and spit me down an endless hole. Where is the desolation for desire? The happier I get, the more my feelings start to burn like fire. My skin gets its glow, but my sanity jumps out the window. I sound the alarm and walk past the shadows of yesterday, lost and astray, where the words once said with such appetite now rest in chains and starve. My romantics couldn’t fool the weary heart. This lullaby is just a long, painful swear that makes you think God created life out of a dare. The affair that holds my roses in the air finally carried me far past where the air is clear and I need not see or hear. I got a patron saint who’s fallen in love with a ghost. He gave her my affirmation. How ’bout that for salvation?