Prizes

There was passion in her eyes From behind the frigid bars Encrusted, they lay, in rust, mold, and misery. There was yearning in her step Hopeless paces across an empty cell, empty years, empty consciousness Longing in the pulse against her fingertips Drumming listlessly through millennia Embedded in each perpetual second. He came in the shadows An apparition Spindly fingers trickling down her frame. With pupils ablaze he brushed a palm across her marble cheek And she retreated Recoiled, retracted. He came in the silence, Shattered it with her name. Her title, her desperate, ultimate bid for love, Her final wager. Inscribed in blazing flames, in searing ice, in apathetic stone, Concubine. And she gazes after Now, as he disappears to better worlds And she whispers in a distant monotone Of the instant, the pinpoint in the twisting thread of time When the silent man grasped her hand And told her it was all over.