Love Poem: Exsquisite Melancholy
Bruce Creech Avatar
Written by: Bruce Creech

Exsquisite Melancholy

Time is like a shadow bright
 It fades and never can requite
 A lip, a shade, a palest kiss 
The sorrow that my heart did wish
 Clasped upon the rose and chain
 When fate cannot thus so agonize
 Time my love so silhouettes
 As though a vogue of deep regret 
These words of subtle renaissance
 Is the cross that beauty haunts
 When the vampire of my love hath gave 
No touch thus blossomed on the grave
 Where love it’s final rose hath laid, 
Ife a cross of tragic waste
 A ghost unkissed that none can save
 Whom haunts upon the untomb’d hills
 Of souls no sorry hath so filled 
Save in an orb of perfect form 
Which revolves its orbit ever more 
Like words of God I whisper thus 
To become no wretch of love untrue.
 Time, my love, a shadow makes 
Beyond where memories never wake
 And shades of fate do silhouette
 The seas and evening’s last regret
 When I alone in loneliness
 of all I ever did desire 
Shouldst ever neath a cross aspire 
To see the sunlight rise again
 Within a coffin made of stone
 Without my dark and final home
 My heart in chains of irony athralled 
the romaunt of this lost abyss
 the seas that thrall the mortal chains 
of every tear so phantom-like 
shouldst thus beneath a cross restrain
 shouldst fall ineluctable
 as though a ghost whose heart bereft
 yea! ghost of every thought our love has kept
 when the iron hand is turned
 throughout the world of circumstance.
 No soul! No solace! No sepulcher! 
On seas of sorrow my soul has thrived 
Into the sunlight of my tears, 
Where eternal is the cross of mine. 
Yet despair! I do not so enthrall 
Nor linger in its gothic halls 
Where haunts a sorrow so forlorn
 The chords of fate are thus so torn. 
Shall not a kiss at last confess
 till every silhouette of love regrets
 the time which did thus or less
 rendezvous with true affair 
for how should a moment thus unbe
 unequal to my tis a thee? 
Yet if a shadow thus can reach
 Just like a phantom in the fire 
As far as any shadow can beseech
 To fall beneath the final breach
 Every pillar made of stone
 Into the coffin of my soul 
Where all my life is laid 
To find my way across the sea 
And back to my surreal belief 
That shadows conspire to be free. 
Yet if a gothic lash of love
 Shouldst caress my very soul
 As though a lover loved untouched
 Couldst thus become unloved 
In shadows I like woes do dream 
Of all that never never seemed 
as though in darkness a faith did boast 
what faith a face did not so recognize 
when met by those most solemn stars
 that ever like the cross are ours.
 My sorrow should confess so close
 Thus a prince and pauper I become
 The pauper prince of love!
 Thus now I see with gothic eyes
 Thy shape as chased by candelight
 As grey as melancholy in the shadowlight
 Where every shadow left bereft
 As grey as melancholy I regret
 One season and a shadow knows
 Whose shape reflects no shade to show
 as far as vast beyond the phantom sea
 thus like fate shall thrive in misery
 though fate fortell what I believe
 yet if in visions vast as true
 as God or man hath given you 
then all my souls so lost forlorn 
shall not thus regret no heart untorn
 o wraith of my most forlorn woe 
my heart no tear my shadow knows
 upon a cross of gothic light