Once

As I wade through the ceaseless depths of youth
When everything seems so surreal
All untrue
The entirety endlessly changing
I see myself in your arms' embrace
Kissing away my fragile tears
More than lovers, more than friends
But connected with deep-sewn adulation...

To feel my skin burn beneath your finger-tips
Hands holding me dear
So close to you
To look into your dark, dark eyes
And have faith in the most perfect feeling
The weight of the secret lifted off my shoulders
With you I'd know how to fly

With you I'd feel no pain, no fear
You're Romeo to this Juliet …
Then why do I feel the roles reversed,
I the de Bergerac
You the Roxanne?

Wrought by sadistic pituitary
Which with wraps my heart in pain
By pheromones unaware
I daren't speak your name aloud
Lest some one overhears

I wish for you, I hope for you
I'll be there for you
When I see you
My blackened, shadowed heart grows wings
All but beating out of me
The right atrium pacing over fast
I have to look away
I can barely meet your eyes

What can be seen there?
What might you know?
Everything phrased correctly
To let you know nothing at all
You'd never know
(I'd never tell you)
All my heart needs to confess

When our eyes meet
I cannot help but try to see
If ever you should think of me
Would you hold me close to you,
Just to hear my beating heart?
Would you listen, would you care
If everything was going right
Or if everything was going wrong?

But the second one of us looks away
The fantasy dissipates
I'd never even talk you
Around you I can't breathe
With this fear I cannot shake
I'll run away
And hide because
I'll never be with you
I'm nothing
You'll never see me here
Not fast enough, not smart enough
'Pretty' not the word
We don't match, the pieces don't fit
We're a pair-up so unlikely,
Two so far across the spectrum
No one's guessed it yet

Mere seconds later, this beautiful fantasy
Is tragically evanescent
I know I hold no ‘love’ for you
The lust is just a pain
Adrenal glands knowing not when to stop
Does it like to see my torment,
As classic as the Daisy Game?
“He loves me …
… he loves me not …”

I convince myself you’re nothing
It’s a phase just long to pass
There’s no use stressing over this
To me you have no charm
You hold no power, none at all
I’ll never need you
And life goes on

Yet as I lay, with sleep evading
I see through all my lies
I need you just like I draw breath
With this cursed ill of mine
The smallest piece will satiate
This love-starved romantic
If you were to walk to me
I would come alive, but
When you walk away from me
I feel I've died inside

With the somnolence sinking in
The wave of sorrow crashing down
I need you
And will continue to
Forever and for always
Like mercy, like the summer rain
You fill the spaces left in my dreams
Light the darkness, feed the hope
Carved by the shadows of my love-less sanity

And still you haunt my nightmares
You
The only one with the power to break me
Acquiescence I never gave
My cracked glass heart in the palm of your hand
Beating softly, scared to death
And you don't even know

Just look into my eyes
I dare you
Let aching truth be known
But this will never happen
Of this I am so sure
Just a smallest instant
God, I wish you’d just see me

Once.