Echo of a love song

I used to believe loneliness was hidden away
and sequestered to places touched only by austere obscurity,
until I found Him. He was lost, a soldier without a battle,
his own worst enemy and one more displaced soul
in a flowing sea of false smiles.

He spoke of florid sunrise as he spoke of a desolate loneliness,
and had found it reflected in the faces of those around him.
He taught me that loneliness can find you anywhere,
even in the most beautiful of places, and we are all created equally
when it claims another casualty. I tasted his sadness
like raindrops on an impetuous wind
and it was exquisite upon my trembling lips.

But what does a tenuous woman like me
have to offer a man whose subdued erudition
has the doleful mourn of a jailed harmonica?
My heart; my aberrant heart...
I gave it, knowing his had been broken
and he carries it laudably, keeping it close to his own.
It hangs from a steel-balled chain, rocking gently
against letters etched in stainless avowal.
And when the rythym is just right, we beat together as one.

We dream in color. We dance, claiming the floor
at our favorite bar. The dulcet tones of a piano
drift through smokey lamp light at the The Blue Derby,
like the ghosts of our fractured memories. In a place with an
atmosphere as blue as the name, we dance.