Love Poem: The Grinning Tears That Held the Shade of Southern Suicides.
Jeanmarie Marchese Avatar
Written by: Jeanmarie Marchese

The Grinning Tears That Held the Shade of Southern Suicides.

There was the capture of life somewhere inside his eyes...

We wiped away tears in the slipping of secrets, and I remembered the draw of suicide as
the shade of Southern Octobers grasped me in his glance.

He pursued me, his kiss and his smile the nets that tangled my feet up North, somewhere,
on I-95, his voice interrupted my destination and I supposed his face at midnight would be
my end, ironic, as he turned death....

upside

down.


We fed on control, that of ourselves, lost it in the snows that blanketed March, and
though I counted every one of my footprints, I only circled myself right back to him.


I never realized the nightmares that held me, the three a.m. teardrops that would stain
his perfect shoulders because my lips tasted that skin right before my last breath was
taken, in the seconds that proceeded the metamorphosis of life, and we took a turn to the
left as we discovered each other on the inside, and I felt that existing in the middle was
better...

than never

existing

at.all.


He heard me, every catch in my voice, every lost word that floated in between the curtains
that we drew for safety, he agreed in the direction of sunrise, for who was I to argue
with silence and the sleep that occurred after I broke my most famous rule?


He wanted us to be normal as laughter interrupted me, as fear grasped my throat, and I
choked on my own words as the dictionary definition of life eluded me, and for those
seconds that threw honesty away, I remembered it was yet September, we were up North, and
the surrealism of tragic Southern October nights were but the embers that burned on the
edge of his 

snow-white cigarette

and the ashes of his exhalations

that scoffed impossibility at me with the hope

that the end would recall I-95

and the remembrance of his smile

at midnight.