Cutoff boy-shorts and
Doc Martens
sad tired eyes that
some times smiled, but
quickly melted into
seething contempt.

Running the eternal
youth night parks
and blue fountains
she always stood just
outside my reality
a phantom.

My immortal-beloved
a vision of movie love
engendered through
a pretty face
floating ghostly over a
curtain of tears
a downpour of bile.

We only existed to
each other as the ideals
that we perfected
in our separate
solitary reactions  to
painful existence
and parted often in
disappoint
only to reconnect
as though the intervening years
had been just a
summer shower
waited out in
a Tardis.

When she came to visit
that last time
she hid from the outside
and then after seeing
that I was not what
she’d written out in
her punk romance
screenplay, she hid
from me too.
Either holding-up with
a lap-board, in my
*******, or next to me
on the bed
folding into herself like
some exponentially reductive
Rubix-Cube.

And whe we parted
it was with
relief.

But like an addiction or
an unfinished tattoo
she lives under my
skin, in the folds of
my brain.  And short of  amputating memory,
slicing away the dopamine spawned visions of
youth
there she will remain.

And I can’t think anymore of
whether she still
hates me, or ever
cared in the first
place
or of a day that things
could be what they
should be
instead of what
history has burned into me
with a cigarette-cherry of actuality.