I am afraid of all the things which came after you:
The smoking, starving, sadness,
the silence and locking my secrets away
and the sight of your brown eyes seeking to look to another.

But with times passage these now have degraded;
I am sometimes happy
Though there are the days when thoughts are
want to wander, unprovoked

For have you ruined me?
Because now
I am afraid all of the people who come after you,
well, my love, they never seem to live up
to the standards that we set.

The mourning by the sun for Venus has particular relevance
On a day when optical illusions earmark the transition
Of your face, from lover to something I am not sure to like

Thickened atmospheric eyes, now cold to the touch of mine
As they move to less pronounced planets, in the endless game of galaxies within galaxies
Tricks within tricks held within the circumference of your palm
which holds still the very sun in reverence
… And fear, of your fingers closing and snap!
Snuffing out the brilliance of the light.

And I stop and try to hold the cosmos steady in your wake
Before these eddies of instability wail and break all down
Hurricanes gathering, electrical storms cascade against black as meteors
follow paths of collision long since drawn in the dust of stars

Down we are to spiral as you become the supernova
Gorging on the **** that we left behind, dark matter seething
disrupting the peace of heavens vacuum as you ***** starlight and magnitude unconfined
The sheer brevity of the universe, whose expansive inertia is forced
to abandon apathy as its constellations are devoured and disgorged

Silent, my darling rips the stars from the sky, breaking fundamental laws of physics with energetic destruction
Radiant rays of glory emanating, mutating all ever known
As she spirals Saturn,
Seeking solstice in the free fall of dusty decimations as
  the sun
          falters.

Its brilliance diminished, total eclipse.
Bringing confusion to corneas
faced now with the explosive onslaught of love and dust
As the astronomical causation and implications of desertion
Rocks universal.

Apathetic atrophy to be favoured now over expansion
as the pieces begin to fall way. Such a day of great reverence,
it's relevance uncontested as time and what didn't come before
is forced from its final, infinite march to cease.

You face, from friend to foe, your name a once so simple,
celebrated noun transformed from the precedence of dawns chorus
to something I cannot force myself
to say aloud.

Black drops, bitter like a shroud
as the sun mourns for Venus, for Venus orbits another star now.

I leave you
Stood silhouetted in the doorway
With light spilling onto the steps
Like liquid brilliance, amplifying my dark

I smile, wave and turn on cold heels
My rictus face falling into lines
As my back faces you and then retreats

This betrayal is so evident to all involved
That we make a mockery not to speak of it
As I leave you and you?

Learn closer and put your arm around hers
And whisper words once previously practiced in my ear.

Darken my doorstep again, you effigy which no longer exists
Bring rise to my mornings and depths to my dark
I seek you; he who does not exist
but in the recesses of remembrance

For time has corroded him and changed him
To be both more and less
And no more to be he as I, in turn, move from she
Who remains tied to the one I loved best.

Move me, like you did when you sighed from the skies
And told me, with one look, the sorrow I saw
You broke your own heart
Disappointment, I was not the one you thought

Come darken my doorstep again,
You effigy of he who ceased to be
Bring rise to my mornings and depth to my dark
I seek you, you *******, I will never be right.

I've done it again, I've cut you with my clumsiness.

A slip of the tongue and laughter loses all that which it once held, falling flawlessly like water through cupped hands.
I kneel before you, attempt to staunch the flow, sudden now, gushing and suspiciously darkened red.

Can't you see what it is that you do to me? Can you not hear the words you speak?  
My hands may be red but so are yours.

I mirror your actions and the consequences are dire; I hate to call you a hypocrite but this self sympathy is starting to get old.

It’s like I wanted you to love me because you were the least likely to, so it was safe to want you because it would never happen. And now you love me and I cannot take back the words I do not mean but which keep slipping off my tongue every time you say I love you.

I love you I love you I love you.

Each a different lie spoken by deceiving tongues. The more you say it the less it means. The more time I spend with you the more I cherish being alone.
I do not want your love nor your hands nor your smiles and happiness or eternal preoccupation with how much you perceive everyone either wants you or to be you.
You are sad and strange and closed off, but now so cracked open wide that I can feel nothing but contempt. Like the still homeless sat with defeat painted on their faces, it is far too easy to want to kick something which is already down than muddy your hand trying to pick it up.

I do not want you, I am afraid. I want the safety of impossibility; you have become far too willing.

I will be nothing for you

No smiles in the darkness
Are to be found on these lips
Lips which curve all too readily
When laughter lingers

Eyes will venture elsewhere
And my feet will follow
For to stay still
Is to degrade;
             to ferment

Even though fermenting
Could yield the sweetest things with you.

Yes, you left.

but yet here remain? Innate and insurmountable.

It is too dark and too late and too soon

It’s always the daytime someplace
And if we were there you would say
It’s too light and too early and too late

And so neutrality would be preferred,
To maintain ourselves on both sides of the fence?

Either side of the fence, you mean
For opposite we stand and shall remain
Until you let me climb over
Where the grass is green

It is no greener here
And all the more feet for trampling
Would ruin what is already bruised
And which would never grow back

I would not trample you.

We were talking about the grass
But now, yes, you will obliterate me
If you take but one step closer

Darling I will leave you
If you do not burn down that dratted fence

Oh my darling,
you were never mine for me to be left.

And I wonder why we do these things
As we sit in silence, the decaying affection mouldering
between us like a canyon.

As you look at me and I look to you
with no way of unseeing
The deficit held within beloved brown eyes

It’s too late now and the sadness has settled
and you have already left
Taking with you the colours from the light
As the ash from your last cigarette smoulders  
and goes out.

I refuse to be half of one whole
For I am enough always
To stay silent surrounded by seas
And as Ellan my will shall remain
Constant, contained and content
For it turns out that I need you not
And that I want you even less.

Sometimes silence is preferred
To those constant constricting string of compliments  
Written in your words and thrown off your tongue
With careless heed of the damage that they do
Irrevocable words of the lies of love and lust
Drip drip dripping down from your lips
To fall simultaneously in hearts and in the gutter
Where ******* collects and rains pour down
Eradicating all trace, but for the heart in which it kindled
No recognition from lips whose secret they once held
Now long forgotten and poorly remembered;
Lacklustre speech trailed and its meaning dismembered
Ill-gotten feelings poorly deceived when hopefully conceived  
From the deceptions which derided and descended
From lips once bloodied; now full of false testament.

Contamination seeps and weeps from pores and migrates from your skin to mine
I cannot see it but I feel it, sliding over me and sinking through layers
Through my skin and my nerves and my tissue down right to my bone
Where you pause; take a breath, look around;
Try on my internal machinery for size and speed and duration
Drag and rip and tear my insides for a sign and the very spark of life
Then, once located you break through, right down and into my marrow
And consume all it is there that makes me immune
Become a part of me in the parts that I was not even aware existed
A lovely parasite who feeds on my secrets and bathes in my blood
A darkness within which perfectly mirrors that already present
Both of me and alien, twisting the two so intertwined that no lines can be drawn
Until we are but intermingled and so all is lost in bones that have become yours
All that skin and those nerves and those tissues, lost unto me and gained by you
To be devoured through duplicities of dancing and deception  
A most beautiful way to die, to simply cease to exist to be
Devoured by a love so consuming and false that not a trace will remain
When you do not falter but dance on; playing out your parody of happiness
With all of those who once thought that they too knew the steps

But now what remains at last knows better
And as it burns it both regrets and adores you
It both loves and it hates you
Wanting but denying the need for a being so superfluously mendacious in their meaning
So extensionally versatile with their morals and reduced in magnitude by their ploys
Now the ash can rise above, constrained by no sentiments to bind nor naivety to hope
To fade into comforting insignificance as you compose a ******* of life with bitter strings
Tying irreversible knots in all others connected to your skin; secured by but the very finest of threads
On the edge and ready to leap; always with a larger hand in sight and the treachery to take it.

You compose my inadequacy,
this front which I present is not true
for I do not want to love you
and you do not want me to.

Love is false;
I trick myself into it every time.

It is strange how looking at an image of you
from so long since last looking into your eyes,

That I can still remember every breath caught
every moment of each second lived
in every silver touch standing in your eyes,
where it was like being seen for the first time,
until you saw too much and too deep and too fast

and then you blinked and I was gone.

Removed from your thoughts and from your life and from your love
which moved on to another, more worthy,
upon whom you can look longer, stand taller, gaze deeper
than I can ever hope to achieve to be.

May we be forgiven,
For pretending for so long
And pretending so poorly.

For never forgetting
(And always comparing)
To that which we had before.

Pray, may we be forgiven?
For I do not know how
To forgive and forget
The crimes of those who once scarred us
And the crimes that we ourselves commit

All in the aim of some previously lost game
Which broke us apart before we met,
And now never to be the same
Haunted by words better thought, not said.

When the grains of your sand
Moved
One by one
Slowly, at first,
Shifting under me
Like it was normal;
It meant nothing.

Until the avalanche came
And a million tiny grains
Grew in velocity
And violence
And suddenly, my very ground,
Had slipped; shifted,
To under the feet of another.

So here now I stand
On this bare; barren ground
Worn smooth by your leaving
Silent in your wake.

I pick up a rock
Hold it in bloodied hands,
And I use it
To forget;
To carve new ground to stand on
But this time I shall not need it,
It shall need me.

He moves over me
A darkened image; blurred
Edges not yet defined
For how to define
That which you do not understand?

Or perhaps comprehension
Is simply ignored
In favour of ignorance
And silence becomes the refrain
From the truth hidden on our tongues.

He rises above me
But I do not feel small
For I do not feel anything
And our kisses taste of guilt
And half spoken secrets
And I wonder, oh how I wonder
If he knows that they do.

And if he cares, like I wish to care
If he wonders
Of the troubles that we do not share
Separate lives, joined but temporarily
Yet not united, still apart
Drifting on a sea of sadness
Caught in the same tide
But not going the same way.

Oh to be dust
Tossed around by the whim
Of the sky and wind
To be free
To never care nor worry nor bleed
Simply to fly on through the mist
And come out on the other side
No different as before,
Just dust.

There is a chamber within my body
Beating, beating, forever beating
Until I am gone and then it is silent
For we are but one

Though at times it does not feel it
And, at times, I wish to rip it out
Drag it from broken skin
We are still together, forever

Until one of us falters
And then we both go under.

Do you know the name
The named things named
When sadness took frame
And solitude turned
To silence hard-fought,
Do you know the name
I hold in my heart?

I can never let myself go
completely

because I am afraid
that I will drift apart

like motes of dust on a sunbeam
yet not quite as beautiful

and somewhat more meaningless.