clock-tick,
latch-click,
footsteps darting down the stairs--

                you're...gone!
*

Fingertips of night smudge and smear their ebony gloss streaks
Down dusty, grimy glass--
Swallowing your spectral image
In the glazed glow of neon-rainbow billboards.

A twenty-first century Lancelot, you don your callousness
And self-loathing like a tarnished suit of armor--
On a chilviarous quest to save two-hundred-dollar Nocturne Ladies
                                                   From drug-primed pimps....
                                                   T h e m s e l v e s.....
                                                    But--n o t  from you!



Passions fire, and my love, follow you
Through myriads of abandoned, midnight alleyways,
And already I have squandered the ghosts
Of your deceptive warmth, and poisoned promises.

The heaviest of down comforters
Fail to cease my chills
And I am as bloodless
As before your first lethal kisses.

Your inevitable absence is the deep burn of frostbite,
Your eventual return an addiction--
The relief insatiable neuralgia--
                         I  c r a v e  your presence.

Your vanishing is like slicing away strips of my skin--
The carving, and cutting release a chronic, arctic cold
That confronts me from within my crystalized soul....  
                           I freeze, and die,  e a c h  time you leave.

**

From within the hollow of our bed
The mist of a heroine-induced haze rises--
Enfolded in the memory of your lingering lust, I slip
between the sweat-soaked sheets, and pain-drenched pillows....

Longing...promising...hoping...that I'll be  gone--t o m o r r o w.....
Waiting...bargaining with the darkness...listening to.....

clock-tick,
latch-click,

your footsteps stumbling up the stairs.............