time flows slowest
around galactic centers and our worst moments
black holes and dying parents
foul, putrid and humid in
acts of betrayal and cowardice
pooling around loss like van gogh’s whorly stars snickering
voyeuristic time crept in at my point of least courage
subatomic tabloid photographers flashbulbs cracking
when I broke your heart one january afternoon
and there was enough time gathered for me
to store all the details of the scene
the way your shoulders slumped and the
straps of your tank top slid a little to the sides
how you looked up and to the left hoping the oak tree out the window
would grow a mouth and explain my sudden departure
if only you could see it through tears coalescing
like soap bubbles summoned between thumb and forefinger in childhood baths
“I promised myself I wouldn’t cry,” you said
and it took me years of vanity to understand you’d known;
my accumulated guilt and sadness had not been subtle

i named my sin at an awkward dinner out
millennia after a stellar collapse in a one bedroom apartment
where I lied and told you it was me
not you but it was you
still burn inside me cold
when I’m alone
warm on days I know I saved our children
from the sad gravity of loveless parents
silently begging of them greatness
to validate a vacuum-empty marriage born of
supposed-to and should in the absence
of desire or at least the resignation
of married friends or Jovian planets unignited

maybe time cups our worst memories before us
in greedy luminescent starflesh hands woven of personal apocalypses
laughing outright when the memory burns away
in solar flare fingers
warps in the distorted fabric of how
we edit and redact those moments to survive sane
and we panic realizing
after breaking or being broken
we have remade ourselves entirely of
shame and misery and misfit parts
devoid of structure beyond weeping
brittle bones of future selves
stolen or relinquished  

or maybe time holds these memories for us immature
baby skull soft
too delicate to be picked through with angry desperate hands
while distance and growth or
maybe just forced perspective
lets the memory or
us harden into something we can pluck
from its hands lifetimes later and lazily
browse like any other casual catastrophe