our love has been empty, useless.

our words flare up in color, but fall away cold. always.

tonight we smolder in stillness, alone in our decay—

sit in our silence that's no longer calm and open,

but broken: eden (our eden) is burning away again,

but this time, you can't say it's eve's fault.

when smoke curls around your words like

sultry translations that I don't understand, we begin burning.

it seems I am learning to stop believing

every silent, simmering word you say.

I throb and scream with every beat of silence,

but ache when your lies drop like hot stones into my heart.

my words of dissent shatter and scatter across the floor.

silence, again—but we are more broken now than even that.