I think you're dead.
You haven't replied to my letters, my calls, my emails, my texts,
my body language, my thoughts, my wishes,
the almost-silent tickings of my heart as it beats closer and closer to where you are.

I didn't want to write this poem, because I didn't think people would believe me.
I thought I should make it a book, or a story, or a newspaper article.
Man Leaves Woman With No Reason, Probably Dead.

We met on park benches, and  under bridges.
In abandoned train stations and  church gardens named after poets.  
We never went out to dinner, or back to each others apartments.
We were too much that combination of whimsy, fear and patience.

I don't know where you live, or who your friends are.
We are ghosts meeting together always passing through each other
never touching.  

I always knew you would leave.
I didn't know how, but I thought I would.
I imagined fights, or the slow dying,
our affection like the tired kidneys of a person
who could no longer filter all the conflicting elements out of
themselves.
I imagined reason.

You only gave me mystery.

Before you left, you said you had to go do something.
You left before I could ask what. You ran away.
The sound of your feet against the pavement like one-handed clapping,
like a tree falling in the woods with nobody to hear it.

Without your return you made me into nobody,
and turned us into a fantasy,
into a poem.
That no one will believe.