It ends:

The resounding sounds bounce
Down the halls,
Bound to a place you can't call home.
Echoes of your lost hellos
Live within those walls,

And between them we slept through
The afternoon.
Between them was all I knew of you,
And between them we kissed
In and empty room,

The ghost of my everything
Seeping through
The open door,
The cracks in the floor,
And so it ends before

It begins.

All I know is the charcoal of my hands: it covers them in such a way that makes me believe the charcoal stain has found its way underneath. I draw myself half a city, until no part of me remains. I then look, so sorrowfully, at the broken landscape. All its harsh edges beg for attention, but I have to ask myself where all the real people are. I look all around, but all I see is you and I, on a charcoal street—somewhere we always wanted to be—hand in hand, off to wander together and gather up all the other real people we meet.

She soaked her raincoat
Through again, her boots are
Full of water,
But tomorrow I will wake and her hair
Will still smell of pine.

Her crooked fingers caught a chill,
For all their heat fled
To her face
When they entangled themselves
In mine.

Heart beats, blood flows,
Like a river from her feet, and
The crimson of her footprints
Scares the locals on the beach.
Red tinted, tainted toes, just
Moving flesh, the indents fresh
And raw in the rough sand. On
The skin of her palm is written

A sin that she committed.
They told her again and again:
"It is forbidden, it is forbidden,"
But what of forgiveness?

God and the Devil know nothing
Of how long she must have waited.

What of all she has given up
To save her inward vision? The one
They told her was found only
Through complete submission, but

God and the Devil know nothing
Of the way she loved that woman.

The summer swallowed
You away with the orange
Blossoms of lost spring

All the loose edges of yourself,
If only out of fear
Of your heart dividing asunder
And sinking underneath.
I, she, he, they,
We are all the same.
In the end, always to
Pretend to understand
The heart of those closest.
What does it mean,
The heat
That comes from closeness?

Bright-eyes,
Warmth-giver,
Why does your heart
Still shiver next to the
One who gives the most?

She breaks away from you, but
You will be left broken in
The wake of all the fragments
Left behind.

Blood runs back to the heart,
As it runs back to her now.
Movements break apart,
Now just a thought--

A mournful sound signals to lengthen the strides you take
To stagger forward.
She, too, boils down to
Just one--

Retreat, retreat,
Rather for fear of suffering
Defeat at the hands of someone who
Merely wishes to love her.

Every word a contradiction.
How many blows of rearranged phrases
To chip a guarded expression.
"What did you mean to say?"

And here you are,
Practicing the art of loneliness,
Shutting all the pain
Outside the darkened window pane.