I
Am
So
Afraid
I
Am
Not
The
Life
You
Envision

I like to believe I've married all of my past lovers in some
parallel universe
I like to believe that somewhere somehow
our love isn't
Dead.

It takes 64 days to get over you
I stop counting on a cold inebriated night,
the dark forest hanging over my heart
and my footsteps echoing in the shirl silence of a wet hill.

It takes 64 nights to get over you,
64 blue evenings, 64 indigo skies without stars, 64 colorless dreams uneven sleeps, disjointed sleeps, and 64 dreams of forgetting.

I count 64 nights, three encounters with cold metal, two brisk walks in the pelting rain, and one soul standing two steps beside my own body, not yelling your name.

When you kiss her
And realize passion does not
live inside her
You will roll over with a sigh and
remember me
You will trace your fingers over my favorite spots and
feel that my prints
Are engaved into you skin
Right there,
To remind you
No one
Can
Touch
You
Like
I
Can.

Circumstance will never understand What
It
Has
Taken
From
Me

So I'll let you bruise your knees on her bedframe
The way I did last Friday night
And after subtle thoughts and unpublished words
Will I still reach for her hand,
But with apathetic eyes and ebony hair,
She grows distant
I recede

I must admit I am more damaged
after you left, less whole.

There is a piece of me
you stole.

These pages are the only
place where I am allowed
to love you,
Thus I write.

Swollen eyes in 6am light
6 wine bottles sing an empty song
Thoughts I never confide

Yet, still you'll kiss the tips of my fingers
as I reach for the keys
because you know somewhere buried deep
You'll water this love at the roots
And I will rot the leaves

I've heard that the first and last are those remembered, but neither stays, nor all those in between, the then and now.

We lose first the face then the feeling, like a thing we hold a little too tight, but then suddenly we have no tenderness, no memory of holding, no memory of soft beds.

Just standing in the hallway between here and there, wondering what could we have possibly said to fill that void.

First breaths, the walls echoing soft moans or thunderous wails.
Frozen prision pizza, the last meal of a dying relationship.

Maybe in that space beyond anything we known, perhaps your tiger tails of dash and dust will cross mine, an arcadia light years from now.

Perhaps I will remember your sent, your smile, the arch of your back, or the way your nails dug into my skin as your lips curved to whisper my name
     before black arcs
                                     Deeper
                                               Into
                                                      Black
Scre­aming past planets and memories that have no name to me any more.
However, what truly stays? Even this moment is now
gone.

To the girl with the notepad
Scribbling war into my skin
Tell it well this time