Like a flipped-over puzzle to me,
the edges of your heartflesh—
regal pieces
of stained glass and veneer.

Who are you, love of mine?
Not my love;
I was never under
such delusion.

I map our trajectory
with sorrowful hands,
the topography of unrequited devotion
an elegy in Braille.

All instruments fail to measure
the weight you carry
in my bones. You would sink me
in the Dead Sea.

And I would live it willingly—
a fate of saturation—
if it offered permanence,
a way to hold you

in my cells like water.
I’d surrender the need
for land and air if we
could inhabit the dawn of time.

I’d cast off all evolution—
eons of bells and whistles—
if it meant
that you could be mine.

Your other self watches softly
from the far side of the room,
a decade and a half or so
between you. I line you up,
placing one over the other
like wax paper for tracing.

More lines this time around,
more furrowed concern
and a sternness
in the pursing of your lips—
flatlining, discerning. I wonder

what has darkened your eyes.
If not time, something quicker
and more violent. It hangs
in the drapes about your face,
upholstery of the self, rolled out.

Nothing wavers in your gaze,
no candles dancing. Only smoke
of a dream, thinning, deferred—
snuffed out.

There’s something about
new-wave jazz,
all modern and electric,
that beckons armageddon—

a set of never-ending
Shepard tones, swelling
in sun-baked suburbia
like a body in the water:

light, rising, mercifully vague
as to the terrors
it may unleash tomorrow.

We are all a little something
human—fragile packets
of bravado and bone, dread
to be alone
but destined for it.

We all deplore it, this existence,
in metered amounts—
twelve teaspoons of having
no thing figured out
for every drop of felicity.

Yet we go persistently
into tomorrow, thrusting away
today's wet weight
with jazz-age paddles
unfit for the cause.

What else do we have,
but to be
without pause
until our fatal
interruption?

To be caught up in
falling down?
Until we're ashes—winding round,
and round,

and round...

You are pristine in my absence,
healing once the picking hour ends.
I stare through our distance—
the fun-house mirror
that has morphed us into friends
who love,
but not in that way
anymore.

Who hug,
but never linger
long enough
to toy with hair and affections.
Who have committed to separate
directions in the sea—
we drift comfortably
and wave from splitting barges.

We bloom best
when left
to our own little acres,
and that
is what's hardest.

I know I cannot have you
(even though I did).

I know that seasons change
and people die.

I know that we spend much of our lives
fighting against such things.

I know that certainty is taxing
when it does not favor you.

I know that knowing becomes a sacrifice
when the truth is out for blood.

It takes time to know these things.
It takes many walks through tall grass
brimming with burred burdens.

Thick skin—
I've been told that I need it. Otherwise,
I'll be painfully privy to the stings of a reality
that remains inconvenient.

Otherwise, I will look at you
(or rather, the image of you)
and feel pain. Otherwise,
I will feel that tug on my lungs—

the collapse of the hope I built so carefully
on the foundations of so carelessly
loving you
back when time and space allowed.

Back when it was easy.
Back when I could have you—
back when I did.

Sustaining such carelessness only ushers in
wicked knells of realization—the weight
of infatuation in wait, stretched thin by miles
untraveled and unseen.

Circumstance becomes unsightly—obscene
when what I know escapes its chains.

So, I refrain from the tightening tether,
skin tanned, but far from leather—
I attempt to clear the ledger and forget my winnings.

I drown all that we took in my misgivings,
now that we're living
where prices rise and bills come due.

I say I know I cannot have you
because it haunts me that I do.