I told you that I missed you
as I grew nostalgic for things
that were never mine
in the first place.

Memories committing verbicide,
bringing to mind your voice
singing love songs in the moonglow,
and censoring the ugliness
of those words you really said.

I told you I missed you
because the words were festering
in my brain and filling my lungs
with air too heavy to breathe.

I told you that I missed you
because I've finally figured out
that all of your little injustices,
all of those things I should've called treason,
don't even begin to match
the chasm you left in my world
when you left.

You are missing from me
and I am a ghost without you.

I told you all of it,
déjà vu bitter on my tongue,
and I blinked as the words floated off
into the space between our lips.

Too little, too late,
you said,
*your love
is only ashes.

I stand, face to the sun,
waiting for the ******
promised to me
by great, ancestral stars
and false prophets.

Your time will come,
and you will be free.

But their predictions
forsake me.

What I thought was freedom
was only a larger cage.

His niceties were inherent,
as were his empty bed
and the empty chair
placed next to his
at the small cafe table.

His women were nice,
clean and crisp,
but they only undressed
in the dark,
and they never
stayed the night.

He woke up
alone
and reaching
for no one;
praying for nocturnes
that never end
or a noose
that wouldn't slip,
when there was
nothing else
to be done.

Another night spent
between walls
that ooze sympathetic smiles;
drinking homemade wine
and raising my crystal glass
in a toast to my homeland-

Congratulations.
You've all gone
to waste.

The genius sheds his skin
beneath the weeping yew trees.
The stars bleed symphonies
into the night sky
and he is whole,
for the first time in his life.

The girl shakes little flakes of doubt
from the tips of her shaking fingers,
allowing it to fall to the forgiving earth.
She loves with an empty head
as chemical reactions combust
within her mortal veins,
and she is whole
for the first time in her life.

You were like the flowers
dying on my kitchen table.
Wilting away, and even so,
gifting me with flashes of color
and the unceremonious bloom
of a forgotten bud.

You were like Billy Holiday
at 3am on my busted record player;
just the slightest hiccup
in your melancholy.

You were an insufferable
embodiment of self-doubt,
nearly tangible in the
sun-starved days of winter.

You were an enigma,
plain and simple,
as nondescript as the fog
before a sunrise in September.

I used to think
that everything would be
easy;
that my pallid brain conveyed
some intricate foreshadowing
of a life unseen, but beheld
like landlocked love.

What I know now is this:
love is a place
without maps or atlases,
where the sea smolders
gracefully into
the horizon,
and my eyes are too tired
to look past the shore.