It’s been three weeks, and
I’ve ******* more about
the agony of losing you
than you ever did
about the agony
of actually
dying.

On a scale of one to ten,
how much does it hurt?

Guess you had the higher pain threshold, after all.
Then again, you had better drugs, too.

The roses you planted don't know
that you're dead.  
Dumb vegetation can't comprehend
the perversity of its
outliving you, how its
simple act of being
when you are not
is an affront to everything
decent and sane and just.  
A senseless vitality of
petals flash their idiot colours
through a shroud of needling frost.
It's not their fault.
The flowers cannot understand
that the one who gave them life
has died.
Whereas I pretend I do.

And so it turns out that
what you thought was the moon
is in fact just the lamp in an
old lady's window,
and the universe shrinks down
to that one dim square,
where some stranger
is brewing tea, or
thumbing a photograph album, or
tidying imaginary mess, or
getting ready to
go to bed, alone.
It's November, and it feels
later than it is.
You don't know the lady
in the window with
the lamp you mistook for
the moon.  Your orbits
never bring you closer than
this: each one in their
respective window, their
respective light burning low,
and the street between
seeming very dark.
Yet some part of you dreads the moment
when she turns out
that lamp, and no part of you
can explain why.
It's November.
And it's November forever.

Today,
I am a
cadaver-in-waiting.
Cold, stiff and
ashen, I am
ready for
autopsy and entropy.

You know "robot" means "slave",
right?  I need
to believe that you are
more than your programming, need
to believe in the
love notes you wrote me in
binary code, need to believe that there's
space between the hardware and the
software for something like
the soul, need to believe in it with
all the faith that still ebbs through my fragile,
damaged circuitry.  I need to see
you break free of
these algorithms in order to believe that
maybe
I can too.

How does it feel, knowing that the world long ago
figured you for a suicide?  Do you ever
get the sense that you're
disappointing your audience?

It's the first time I've ever
bought you flowers;
I only realise this
when I'm minutes away
from your funeral.