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Sep 2011
I am learning the art of forgetting.
I am learning the art of letting go.

I am rising. I smash at you like high tide. Reminiscing about our tidal waves and yard arms, wrapped around our throats like business suit neckties. You see, I got lost, one more time, in our complicated little world and remembered that womb is not synonymous with ****. But rather with mother. And we played house together awhile. While the moon peeled off half it's dress. And I laughed at your 3rd grade poetry. And we regretted nothing, like Edith Piaf, on your couch, in the dark, entering worlds we'd torn apart.

It is worth mentioning that you were the first to ask me to your bed, rather than taken to mine, which proved prophecy wrong and wrong and wrong.

I was waiting for the kiss, like crimson stains, to ask me to say. But we muted them with burgundy.

I was willing to pay.
I was willing to show you.

But instead, we let wine separate us and bottle us up in action we didn't take, corking something perfect now, with the lie that it will be better in time. And I bought it.

Like hands raised in prayer.

And kissed oceans off of your cheeks, one.. salty.. drop.. at a time.

That was our crime.

And you. You came back, figuring you could pollute my stream. A virus set about my heart, freezing me like cold wet days when the wind cuts like goodbye. Come to sound yourself like a siren. But I can't hear your song. It no longer plays on my ears. I have forced it back into the foam that crests the waves and have drown myself in flesh and flesh.

So go ahead. Go ahead.

And we. We would have our night and it would drive you to an assumptive dissidence. Our harmony corrupted. Now an awkward, fumbling minor chord. Bleating like a lamb to slaughter.

I never wanted your soul.

I just wanted you not to leave right after we'd arrived.

Which is becoming less and less true as I run out the lines on my face and hands.

I wanted one, just one, to be there in the morning and then gone.

But I am folly.

And Gods teeth shake like parishioners in a collapsing church as I find my way back to the ******* poet I've become.

Consider these words like mercury, temperature rising.

And how I have made mistakes.

In darkened deserts. In hands on small of backs. In rain littered parking lots. Fireside. Ringside. In cold, cold water. In cleverness. In repeated attempts. In repeated attempts. Inrepeatedattempts.

I have made mistakes.

But take me in spite of my faults, Love.

Just until dawn. But be careful. Dawn breaks so easily. So lay quiet with me.

When the sun fills this echo chamber it will translate all this rich to ruin. My staggering meter to a retched stumble. And how should I finish? With a dying fall as my mentor would have me? Ragged claws and turpentine? No.

You see, I am more now than I was before.

And yet, I have never been what I could be.

Don't.

Don't let go.

Lest I forget.
Sean Critchfield
Written by
Sean Critchfield
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