The Romantics

The poet speaks with pen in hand,
Words written in blood the color of ink;
The artist speaks with heart on sleeve,
And fills the room with razor-edged valentines.
Rice paper feelings,
Once so cleverly concealed,
Crack and curl under the heat of words
That burn with fiery passion.

The poet and the artist,
So oddly matched in temperament and vision --
Dreamers who build castles in the sky;
One would lovingly keep them forever,
One tears them down when weary of the game.
Both see the poem in the innocent child,
Both recognize the romance in the grotesque
      and the tragedy in beauty --
And who can say who their tears are for?
And who knows, when their laughter rings,
What absurdity has caused their mirth,
For they know the ironies of life so well.

The sad and silent tears of the poet
And the bitter, angry tears of the artist
Create a relationship so painfully sensitive
That it borders on hostility --
Yet this fragile alliance transcends basic emotions.
They toast that which gives warm comfort,
Easing the hunger for that which neither can hope
      to possess:
Because the poet hears what others do not
And the artist sees what others cannot,
Immortality shimmers in the distance,
Translucent and forbidding,
Teasing them with glimpses of eternity
That face away in the twilight mist.

For love so tender and joy so frail,
The poet and the artist sacrifice sanity ad logic
      to obsession and dismay --
Gazing at each other through an empty glass of wine,
Reach out to soothe the pain,
And slash each other bloody again and again.
The poet sighs and weeps and screams on paper;
The artist laughs and revels in his madness,
Splashing canvas with the colors of his soul --
They suffer the agonizing certainty of oblivion
While riding high on the wings of time.