She wore a butterfly, gold and trembling,
perched at the hollow of her throat,
where Amazing Grace drifted faintly,
like smoke from a dying candle.
Her nails, chipped with the color of regret,
clutched years she could never restore,
bloated on squandered time,
her body an elegy of famine and fire.

He stood in the shadow of her unraveling,
his gaze mapping the sharp terrain
of bony shoulders, brittle wrists—
a cartographer of her ruin.
His fingers whispered along her flesh,
as if tracing verses in invisible ink,
his words dissolving
in the cotton of her discarded dress.

How do you leave a woman
who is already half gone?
The butterfly quivers, the song falters,
and the keys fall silent in his hand.
Goodbye, he thinks, is not a word
but a weight
that neither of them can carry.