There was a time
when you and me
were a single word,
and all I heard
in the beating, fluttering earth
was the breath
of you next to me,
when my curves fit yours
because that was home.
My body’s lonely now,
now that you and me
are two different words
and I can’t hear you anywhere
in this silence,
because I don’t remember what it felt like
to hold your hand anymore,
because you decided that anymore,
you didn’t want to hold me.
A Lover’s Lament, or “I Am Confused.”
I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could choose to throw me away like trash, while I am only just now beginning to slough off the skin of our life together like so many dead cells become love litter. The detritus of memories rots there on the floor, as every day I am forced to trample it underfoot as if it were nothing, and I were not worried in every moment that something will snag and I will trip. Too often, so often, I fall anyway. I am confused, dear lover.
I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could not be at every moment distracted, wondering where the new rush of air through one more hole you hadn’t noticed in yourself is coming from. Does not your body ache from the pock marks of so many barbed associations? Are you not left with new emptiness and crevices as the once fertile ground of your soul dries and cracks with a terrible opening groan? Do not you feel as if there are parts of you missing? Are you not spending every waking and sleeping moment searching for where they have gone and how you could possibly, desperately, ever in your life or your death get them back again? Are you not dying from the nothing of where you used to be filled? I tremble every second, wondering if this will be the time when my increasingly paltry skeleton crumbles. Did I not make up just as much of you? I am confused, dear lover.
I am confused, dear lover. I am confused how you could have escaped the shroud of insanity that is slowly settling over me as I see your ghost at every turn. My mind breaks just a little more every time I must exorcise your demons, finding again a phantom that must be released from a particular way of flicking my hand, or tilting my voice, or arranging my face. I do not know whether it is better to slowly tease away where you have interwoven with every fiber of my being in an attempt to salvage what is left of the original cloth, or if I should just cry to hell and remove the stuff of both you and me with a slaughter of tearing, unforgiving attrition. It’s not like I would be left any more frayed than I am becoming now. I am surprised, from the way that your fingers used to interlock with mine, that you are not finding yourself similarly ragged. I am confused, dear lover.
Oh dear lover, I am confused.
You Are A Ghost, You See
You are a ghost, you see.
You haunt me not so much
in the traces of your life littered
among the foundation of mine,
the trinkets and bestowals of a love
I once thought was true.
No; your memory is nothing so easy
as those leftover tangibles I can hide in a box.
It is the phantom of you, that I cannot abide;
the ephemera of your mannerisms
that now color mine;
the cadence of your voice that carries on in my conversation,
because the pattern of my words had learned to follow along.
It is the beating and the rhythm,
the hand gestures,
the faces,
the little movements of my existence that had come to keep pace
with yours.
You haunt me in my very viscera,
the way that my tendons line together
and the circles my joints make when they move.
People, we come to mirror the thing that’s most before our eyes.
And even though you are now gone
I cannot rid myself of your reflection.
You are a ghost, you see,
and I am your phantom.
She was the dowager queen, they said,
never married at all but once.
But I have seen the wrinkles in her eyes
and know they are faded
far beyond the skin of time.
Boys will be fair, she said one day
while I sat at her knee,
and men may be kind,
but life is cruel
and in the end a heart can break
more than once.
I looked up at her,
the questions in my eyes,
and for once
there was no disguise
for the pain behind the laugh lines
and the crow’s feet
and the bags
that so often escape the notice
of those who do not look for life’s weight.
She smiled,
the only cruel mockery
time had left her
of a once whole heart,
shook her head,
and sighed.
In the end they will disappoint you, my dear,
the lovers, the suitors, the husbands, the friends.
They will murmur sweet words
while they lay in your bed
but the days always come
when the dream will end,
and you will be left
with the scent on your pillow
and nothing but the excuse of their lips.
And even should the sweetest stay,
in the end this world will have its way
and the lips will turn cold
even if the heart does not –
and time will do a man’s job for him
should he refuse.
If he does not leave,
then he will be taken.
I raised my face to protest
but there was nothing to say,
not when the dowager looked that way.
Not with the memories tearing through her eyes
and ripping across her face,
her old, veined hands trembling,
held by a thousand ghosts.
They say the dowager was only married but once.
But I,
I say that she has been married forever –
or not at all.
Quill Aquiver 