Sunset Summer

The Graduate watched the heavens burn, bruised,
the fleeting warmth of a phantom hand in his own.

The Remnant was a year younger than he,
still rose-colored and blinding, a blossom
bleeding pollen. She was coffee brunette,
sometimes strawberry blonde. Unobserved,
undecided, she was the question mark ending
of a sentence never spoken.

They met in the summer when the days
were so long they seemed to run together,
blue and crimson, spirits and visions. They
shaded those days with complimenting colors.
A contorted age of madness and fervor,
they unfolded into one another like lines
of a riddle neither could solve alone.

The nights were short, but bright light casts
deeper shadow. Under cover of darkness,
weakness revealed withering, writhing flesh
burning in the heat of their dreams—dying stars.
The Remnant cradled and comforted him, his
mourning silent and dry. He longed for
an answer he already had.

Once, after the sun had scorched the earth
with its many repeated passions, he fled.
The moon moved slower in those late days;
the midnight dragged on as the Graduate
desperately retraced the steps of the
person he could no longer be,
chasing a ghost of spring.

Eventually loneliness found him on a park
swing, half-asleep, swaying. It assumed
the form of the girl who had died, the Saint
of Suicide. She took his hand, and he knew
who she was. From the void came rain.
The soil drank with a sudden lust, drought
melting away with his fiction.

When even loneliness abandons you,
there is an impossible emptiness. But
eventually, Graduate, the sun will rise.
A shade darker, a touch colder, but it will
rise as sure as spring will return and
famine will fade. So watch the horizon,
because you owe that much
to the one you left behind.