"It's not love."

Okay, sure,
so suppose I were to concede.
Then you're positing that
more than half the love I've ever received
has always and forever been null.

Memory loss;
I know you're serious,
but every time you try to speak to me
I'm dropping words and sounds
like an imaginary hot potato,
thrown to me by a very rude child
who thinks making me lunge a thought
away from me counts as being safe.

I know you said something,
sounded like white noise,
sounded like the conversation
I think we're having right now,
I'm behind five sentences,
or maybe five minutes,
something there sounds about right.

Keep speaking, I can only hope to catch up,
this constant amnesia is aching
and my head is in a fog,
but I know you're serious
and you said something, something...
memory loss.

You held back with so much tension,
every time you laid a finger upon my skin,
and I never realized how much
you must've been fighting
your compulsions
to break through me.

Soft lips, the absence,
cold hands touching a boiling ***,
all of it overwhelming.

Lisps, nothing but blurred
s's and slurred whispers
of reassurance and love.
So much blind love, so much
lying, so much forgetting,
so much resting in the
space between the absence.

I loved you once, then I
forgot, and loved you again,
and forgot, and loved you
again in memory, I have forgotten.

The absences are wavering;
they teeter like a fresh vase on the edge
near an unruly cat,
nothing tethering the events
of the slurred words from
soft LIsPS, but the
love almost did.

So I think.

The man I loved is dead and gone
and rest before me, a carcass;
his shaky hands and shaky breaths
are almost fully silenced.

I don't recognize that sound of his,
unusual and discordant,
those mumbled songs and deepened voice
have surely lost its purpose.

Say it's you one last time,
suspend all disbeliefs;
with open arms and inviting eyes,
tell me all that you've repented.

Salted, flimsy orange rinds,
bittered instead of sweetened:
these are all I eat nowadays.

Crystalline textures coat my insides,
my blood pressure’s at an all-time high,
and my tensions are shooting through the roof.
By god, I’m so naïve,
So untouched by anything other than this,
it seems unlikely
that I would taste such saccharine things,
I’d be much more inclined to shrivel up my insides,
dehydrate all my limbs and pack them
like raw meat in a harsh winter.

I feel useless again.

It’s a trigger, I think.

I’ve had a talk like that one
a million times
in three voices, two men, one woman,
in my many nightmares,
in my day to day living,
I’ve heard that one too many times.

A swirling tunnel,
a downcast drain, flushing
twisting impressions
of time and space, corrupted
in their voices
in my ears
and I think, surely,
that had to be a trigger.