barely a day or a year or a
timeline where i'd chart how far i'd fallen through,
the occasional witty remark. shut, up.
the hours don't matter in the face of a current you can't face
alone. anyway,
you can take my hand.

reliving the poems i’d write with these lips-
different from my mistakes
or your silk-spun kindness and
not a step placed wrong.
you told me it was early in the morning but you’d never looked more
beautiful.
a vignette of something incomplete, a forest
catching me out of breath and impossibly
in love with you.

so when I look from zenith to horizon I can no longer tell whether I am myself or I am Leah-wife-of-Jacob, who maybe cried the same tears I did when she realised he would never love her. I could almost drown in all the insignificant pain of others before me who loved a significant her to no end or, avail.
Because it was me who was recalled to life on a single note of your voice which time has boldened to singularity. And it was you who said the best people get lost along the way with your back reflecting this half of the room. And yet
Anxieties flickering to embers; awakened.
Video tapes filed away; unpacked.
If I could not cry I would not, even when you shook my cynical bones to turbulence and life with the reminder that you are ephemeral and so am I. How should I pretend to live knowing that when I lose you this time it will not be to self-control, but to forces of something as calculated as time.