Monica disappeared
She told me she might love me
I told her where to meet me
But when I got there
She was gone

I had become enraptured
By her cherubic face
Elfish, tomboy haircut
Law-breaking smile
I should have known there was something lurking
Behind it
Some secret or some thing
Some One
Some dark, ugly lie she’d found herself caught in
Fly in a spider’s web, vulnerable
But it was easy enough to see
She was too hard to let anything hurt her
She might as well have hurt me

I never told you how
Her kisses left me breathless
The music of Cocteau Twins came alive
In her ethereal expression
As our lips reluctantly let go of each other
Her sated smile told the story
Of happy endings and serendipity
The Fates had other plans
And maybe she knew it.
So somewhere in her heart or her head
She had conspired with the Great Unknown
To break my heart
And so she disappeared.

Lost, flawed goddess?
The woman kept her fair share of secrets
And most likely a greater lot of lies she’d fed me...
Cotton candy to a baby

Grim acceptance of the brutal reality
Brought home by her disappearance
And nailed shut by the knowledge

That I would never again, in my life,
Here and in the Great Beyond,
See her face, kiss her lips, relax in her embrace
Never again dance to Springsteen’s slow songs,  silently surrendered to sensuality and the staggered stagnation of sense and sensibility and I would drive all night just to buy her some smack…whatever she wanted

Hear her voice
In this place I will call her “mine”
In this place
She would confess, "I'm yours"
So much like a dream
In this place
Look into her eyes then
Wake
Wail and moan for the miles that separated us
The sackcloth and ashes well worn in the years since
She vanished into thin air

She’s as dead as if she’d stopped breathing
As if her heart had actually stopped beating.
The period for grief and mourning are long past
And yet here I lie
Overcome by a tsunami