Poetryportrayal - Tumblr Posts

close the door on your way out

At night, her grey eyes faintly glistening in the light of a row of lampposts, she stood in the shadow of a suburban cul-de-sac front porch. She mouthed with a grin, in the language of cigarette smoke, the words he would pronounce, his back resting upon an orange steel locker. She’d usually roll her eyes and answer:

Well, that’s very nice. Now, be a dear and close the door on your way out.

She chuckled thinking about it. He didn’t know that, afterwards, she’d lock herself in the bathroom stall, the no man’s land where the wandering soldiers, enslaved by dreams with no perspective would carve the truth with their bitten bitter tongues. And oh boy the profanity. She’d sympathize with the blistering paint of sin while running her fingers over the walls’ scars and tattoos, let their meaning soak her fingertips. She liked it. But did she understand it? She once saw:

If only we could all love.

This sentence creeped back to her with the small-town breeze, seeping into her skin. She put out her cigarette against the shadowed brick wall and sat back on the patio chair. She noticed how rusty the metal was. Maybe it had always been that way.

She wanted to write a play. Not a famous one that would make the Hollywood actors drool, but one of those eighty-cents coffee stained and dog-eared garage sale plays that you’d buy out of pity and out of a tingling curiosity for the literary pariahs. The sort that receives a scattered applause, the actors timidly bowing in response. But it would be about the caesuras of the heartbeat of this town. It would be about the dark blue teenage dreams.

Her eyes wondered to the cigarette ashes laying on the floor, intently staring at her. She smiled in approval to her thoughts, got up, and went back in.

© Margaux Emmanuel

Liebestraum

Liszt’s Liebestraum playing in the background

She watched the two lovers while gripping a trembling glass in her hand. He caressed each note’s delicate skin, responding to every one of her quivers, covering her neck with slow kisses, holding her hand through the peril of the third candenza. No desires were left unfulfilled. Every pressed key said je t’aime, brought the two farther from the heavy haze of the day, interlaced into one dream of love unattainable by the mournful song of reality.

“Have you ever loved me?”, he asked. She turned back to him, unwillingly letting the pianist part from her sight. She took a nervous gulp from her drink, avoiding his eyes. She noticed that his lips were hanging apart, longing for an answer. Her eyes wandered again towards the origin of this music of the heavens. Was it jealousy that she felt? A bovarysme?

“Why did you ask me to meet you here?”, she finally replied in a low voice, not looking at him, the pain crawling onto her words.

“Mon amour”, he whispered, his shaking hands snaking towards hers. She let them intertwine.

Don’t call me that, she thought. She let him.

“This-”, she said, letting the words dangle in the air, her eyebrows scowling from the distress in the stiffness of his fingers. She stopped, licked her lips, and let the background melody inch back into her ears.

“This… has been over for a very long time, Arthur”, she finished, dipping into the placid waters of his brown eyes, in a cracked murmur.

The bags under his eyes were heavy, the tense lines of his face were hidden under a patchy beard; he hadn’t been sleeping for days. She had never called him Arthur. Resigned, they both moved their chairs in the direction of the pianist, sticky tears consoling their cheeks. They wondered what love was while watching the Liebestraum couple dance in such unison, wearing the foolish grin of passion, yet knowing that the night always ends.

“We never had that. We never had… anything”, he calmly said.

The pianist embraced his love one last time. His fingers parted from her thirsty touch, craving for more. The listener could almost hear their silent weep, could almost feel the suffering in his fingertips. He rose from his seat, bowed. Nobody applauded. He left the scene.

© Margaux Emmanuel

What do you think?”, he asked in that raspy voice of his, an unlit cigarette between his teeth, the “-k” firmly pressed against his palate in an assertive manner, while unscrewing a burnt-out lightbulb. She was sitting on the windowsill, only wearing his dark blue Lacoste polo shirt, unbuttoned. Her back was towards him but she could feel his every move, she knew that he would have that slight habitual scowl resting on his face and that he would mutter “shit” under his breath any second now, realizing that the lightbulb didn’t fit. “Shit”, he whispered. There it goes. “About that book of yours?”, she finally answered. She could sense his head’s nod, he was too busy to notice that she wasn’t facing him. She slowly brought her naked legs, covered in a thin layer of goosebumps from the chilly morning air, back into the apartment. He was standing on the old chair, the straw seat deforming from his weight, a dozen lightbulbs at the chair’s feet, slightly rolling back and forth, back and forth, from the uneven floorboards. His head was a harvest of untamed blond curls that he had never quite grown out, tickling the back of his shirt’s collar. He had those green-blue marshland eyes that would remind her of those times when she used to swim in the dark green creeks with the small-town kids. But then, suddenly, you had to quickly jump out to run after the ice-cream truck’s music, the water dripping off your wet body, tracing your steps on the concrete pavements. You would never quite see the truck, you could only hear it; you had to trust the melody. He hadn’t known her back then.   “What do you want me to think about it?”, she inquired with a slightly flirtatious grin after a long, reflective pause.  He let out a small laugh, still fiddling with the lightbulbs. “I… want you to think that it captures the beauty of your touch”, he said in an almost mocking manner, his eyebrows rising as he pronounced those words.  “That doesn’t really mean anything does it?”, she replied with a perplexed smile. “It doesn’t. You need to understand that you aren’t a muse; all of the sentences of my book are already written in the crevices of your skin.“ He was silent after that. "Well, you could do better then.

water sizzling on the concrete | © Margaux Emmanuel