From this bridge of sighs
They watch the chasm sunder
Here, where dreaming ends
Ryan Stone
Divorce
Fleeting
Fleeting
In bed
their tattoos met
and bled.
Ink-kissed
lovers, knowing
their tryst,
night-born
would live to die
with dawn.
Ryan Stone
In Passing
After all the years, the heart-shaped
promises, a Ponts des Arts love lock
one Spring, it has come now to this —
a sterile room, too-small-for-two bed,
plastic flowers, faint urine smell.
Standing bedside, she strokes and hums,
remembers a warm night by the sea.
The setting sun kisses white hair
golden. Tremors become twitches,
become silence.
Ryan Stone
Shades
Her kiss
at dawn is what
I miss
the most –
as day break sings
a ghost
refrain:
love dims to dust
and pain.
Ryan Stone
Bonnie & Clyde
On a Monday I met her, but should’ve known better-
moon days bode ill for new friends.
Lunar sea tides with light and dark sides
make Monday trysts wane to weak ends.
Aphelion eyes, dark hair and toned thighs
presaged a blue moon ascending.
With a wink and a gun, she blocked out the sun
in total eclipse, never-ending.
Said, taking my hand: you’ve the look of a man
who’d rather not sleep ’til he’s dead.
I refuse to work harder or pay for my Prada,
let’s dance with the Devil instead.
We ran for a time on a dream and a dime,
both stolen and hard to sustain.
At the trail’s grim end, a posse of men
machine-gunned love’s final refrain.
Ryan Stone
First published at Poetry Nook, May 2017.
Rhyme of the Kingdom
Over the mountains
and down to the sea,
you must come now
if you hope to break free.
No time to mourn
for Autumn’s red bowers;
the light we once made,
now darkness devours.
I can play you
the rhymes of the kingdom,
I can sing you
the songs that you know;
but we must take wing
from this darkened halo –
we must take wing
for a devil wind blows.
Break from your prison
of urban malaise;
run to the ocean,
fly from your home.
I offer no promise
that we’ll make it –
but take my hand
and I’ll never let go.
– Ryan Stone
Teacher
A wail
of sirens makes
her pale
with fear,
returns her to
the year
she stole
a cub from his
foxhole.
Ryan Stone
Ingénue
Ingénue
Raindrops –
steel drums, belting
roof tops.
Loud beats
unheard beneath
white sheets
where two
hearts shed one last
taboo.
Ryan Stone
Dusk
Dusk
Twilight
sheds her mantle
for night.
They come
together, meld,
succumb.
In eyes
deeper than time
she dies.
Ryan Stone
The Grey Mornings
I start at the sound of each car passing
on midnight streets outside;
hoping it’s you,
knowing it isn’t.
Dreams fade with your warmth
as reality slowly intrudes:
it would be enough
to fall into your arms
and know I’d wake there, too.
I am only real
when you are near,
but you never stay
and the grey morning is close
and mine alone.
Ryan Stone
days of stone 
