A Sad Song Blithely Sung
As if pain could no longer hurt,
she sings of love embezzled by loveless men.
As if with a drought in her eyes,
she echoes a memory of tears.
As if melancholy were an old friend,
she confides dreams unrepentant.
Her voice, scarred by sighs
and the consolation of narcotics’ embrace,
wavers and cracks when she sings,
and the cracks are fault lines,
sending forth shudders of
rapture and fracture, illusion and disillusion,
in an ecstasy of heartache that
rends the air and desolates the night
long after the song is done.
But across her voice also stretches an indigo sky
in which the stars are not stars,
but embers hung up high,
beyond the reach of the
highest tides of disenchantment,
ever wistful with a last glimmer of hope.
As if the only thing that could still surprise her
were, at long last, happiness,
as if life couldn’t fool her again with its
false promise of amaranths,
she serenades the heart’s vagaries,
and offers up a cluster of weary smiles in
a sad song blithely sung.
- inspired by Billie Holiday
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