Dressed in the tatters of her latest mistake
she will tiptoe into your life like a passing thought.
She will offer some token of herself
while collecting the emotions which tumble careless from your lips
to nourish the leanness of her soul.

She will pour herself into you
and like gasoline ignite your smoldering loneliness,
and warmed by that heady inferno
she explains that she long ago traded everything constant
for a frantic ceaselessness
and a freedom borne of detachment.
Now her flesh is made of smoke and shadows
that pass over your senses but cannot be held.
For weightless as she is,
a passing breeze might carry her away.

So though you stand before her naked as a smile,
anchored to the very earth with promises,
you are not surprised to find she has shrugged off the hopes
that you draped so carefully across her shoulders
and tiptoed out of your life,
for she was never yours, but only her own.