You bound my wrists
With tithe and tides and barbed wire
Draped your braided halo around my throat
Told me you’d never leave
Till you did and fogged my glasses
With recursive memories.

We are strangers now
Or always were
Because I could never
Love a person who’d do that
To someone. Maybe it
Was just the way you
Made me feel like home,
Like the ******* sun,
Like I understood why
I wanted to exist,
Why every other pop song
Is about this corny *******
That really is the only reason
To keep trudging in circles
Trying to replicate
A beginning point
We will never again find.

Because love is something
I only really understood
After you left, when I
Felt my blood harden
And my senses regurgitate
Memoryaftermemoryaftermemory
Until every pulse was a trigger,
When I saw how wretched
You were, felt the sidewalk
Shear my skull clean off,
Even then, and even now,
When you well up inside my head
I feel the skin on my back
Disappear and I am warm
Because you never stop loving a home,
Even when it is no longer yours.  

I don’t intend to ever see you again,
I don’t want to know who you’ve become,
All I know is the girl I loved is gone,
But I hope she’s happy,
I hope she’s happy and I hope she’s loved,
Because I will never forget
What it’s like not to be.