I bought you the last meal we’ll ever share together,
a far cry from all the other food pressed between our lips.

quietly shuffling damp twenties from my pocket
amidst your insistence to proceed otherwise

three months and twenty two days shy of our anniversary
I don’t have the kind of money you’d like me to
my bank account is empty and
hemorrhaging a nine hundred dollar debt to you.
you’re flicking silver cards between your fingertips
tongue like gravel
all I’ve got is cash

the day I leave you, I lie in bed naked
alternating my excursions between brushing my teeth and *******
sometimes both, at the same time
like I’m cleansing the filth from all my crevices
clearing out the decay and rot

It’s poetic to think of your absence
like the gap left after a rotting tooth
pungent and expectant
but in reality clearing my bowels
or the spaces between my molars
makes no difference to the dark
cavern that lives inside me

a space with no sharp corners or dead ends
but an endless death

one I know too well
and spent too many wet nights
trying to force upon you

alone in the dust and clatter I succumb to it
unable to distinguish between
the sore of an infection
and the sear of a wound