For the one I never knew, just how much I would miss you

 

Yet a new journey from one house to

another;

from scenes of a childhood to the scene of a murder,
the butcher,
of days when I could still dream.

I step onto the train, sit down on the floor,
with my back to the wall facing the toilet stall

door:

in this country we leave each other to search for
spaces that aren’t there.

Those pale blue eyes will never read the notes I was writing
in the margins of the novel I planned to give you
as a spontaneous gift / excuse for acting like a prick.

Thoughts & memories began their attack & so
I abandoned the project, left it to
the future
we knew would still be waiting.

 

Now, reading those scrawled excuses,
wishing
each letter was a bullet or sword,
piercing the presence of your absence,

I can only see those

last written words pinned to the wall

of the room in which,
for a while we performed the trick

of living.

 

After these two years I have learnt

how to follow every step across each

floor; every right angle of every wall,

to walk toward the shower/shitter

in darkness: I could make the walk

with my eyes closed.

 

Two years ago – February 

14th – such a lovely Valentine gift! –

I moved in to this house of unloved things

& became one of them.

Until gold & blue colours, like

bright sunlight meeting an ocean,

appeared at my door.

 

Soon, every week we broke the law,

as society locked-down I crossed town

so we could spend days & nights

drinking together, fucking each other

as if there would be no tomorrow

& not caring either way.

Then the weeks

became months; the winter

 

crawled through spring & became summer.

All the while I pined for another: my

wildflower amour, my amante, the one

who sent me into exile & into

this house with its smell of neglect,

self-pity & cigarette smoke…until

their moonlight eyes returned from dreams

to begin a day where we could satiate

our longing for sweet nostalgia.

 

So I unfurled & left behind

everything I found in those Ocean Eyes.

I followed the path back toward  

life before exile but

of course, it couldn’t last:

it was doomed from the start & that

is when I met the raven with the soul

of a van Gough landscape,

but by then it was too late & escape

was all I craved…

 

Through it all I let my attention drift

into filthy depths of desecration. 

 

Until raven hair, sunset lips,

sibylline eyes & such slender fingertips

 

fell from the sky to find 

release

in a blue so ugly when compared to

 

the sky in which they used to fly.

At 2 a.m in the morning the thoughts became starlings;

dispersing, flying & reforming again,

afraid a cage & the end of all freedom

lay hidden, patiently waiting.

 

Yet other nights they would fly above

evergreen trees, winding paths &

fresh clean streams.

 

Some nights the trees became

something they could never be, &

the water turned to perfect mirrors

flowing towards an endless sea. 

 

Now

the starlings are starved & dying,

motionless on blackened trees 

above a burnt & barren ground

 

where there is nothing so beautiful as you,

or birds flying through 

the clearest

blue sky.