By my standards,
he is a ten.

I'm sure you're
laughing right now--
"ooohhhh, she think's
he's a TEN"--
but that's not
what I mean.

What I am trying to say is that,
on a scale from one to ten,
one being indicative of
experiencing little to no pain
and ten being indicative of
experiencing a pain whose presence
is capable of knocking the wind
straight out of me--
a pain that I do not
dare to fathom
for fear of prolonging it--
he was a hurricane.

My hurricane.

The eye of the storm,
his aloof ignorance
paralleled against the
violently cyclonic nature
of this heartache--
cacophonic in its impact
and blasphemous in
every context of the word
Love.

I don't think
getting caught in the rain
has ever hurt quite this much.

Yet,
I surrender to this hurt
the way the sea surrenders
to the Almighty Poseidon;
the way my feet surrender
to the rocks
tied round my ankles;
the way my soul surrenders
to its contusions
(so is a casualty
of a broken heart).

Still,
I imagine what it would be
like to kiss him
when I wake up in
the middle of the night,
lucid dreaming and
shivering against the bed sheets
(must be hypothermia,
I think;
the coldness of his
absence settling among the
loneliest parts of me).

I try to remind myself
that he was never
any happy ending of mine--
just an ending.
And something tells me
kissing him would feel
a little less
like thimbles
and a little more
like sewing needles.

After all,
he always did have
a way of silencing me,
my lips stitched together
into the most morbid
of embroideries.

Because god forbid
you dare question
a tempest--
even when he has
left you
to stew in your
own ruin--
for fear of provoking
his stormy wrath.

Part of me has
always been
afraid of him,
you know.  
Looking back now,
that should have been
my first indication
that I had been entertaining
an abusive relationship.

No,
he never laid a hand
on me.

But
I was terrified that
there would come a day
when he would eventually snap.

I can envision it--
ribs crack like lightning;
bruises congealing beneath
my eyes like grape jelly;
fingerprints seared
across my cheek;
my head held underwater
until I've stopped
breathing altogether.

Of course, there exists
more than one way
to destroy a person,
though he will claim
that he has done nothing
to wrong me.

Surely,
he would tell me that
I am just reading
too much into things.

S'pose it's your turn then,
darling.

Trace the brailed veins
of my shattered heart,
and feel all the ways
you have broken me so.

Let your eyes flit
across the expanse
of these water-logged stanzas--
and tell me,
does the poetry not speak
for itself?

Or does my drowning not suffice?