As it grows dark
As the corners of today’s page furl
Empty rooms, homes without windows, drugs without users, a body untouchable, growing cold
As if alight sparing flame
Never to relive
Nor consume nor nourish
This terrible emptiness
As she feels the pain that comes afterward
Inevitable. Old. Crushing. Familiar.
She wants to run to you
But you’re long gone, if ever present
Diminished and relinquished
Pouring medicine down the drain, till needful of no refreshment
Even beauty turns to stone
Even love robs itself destitute
As lovers hate the very thing that made them burn
The taste in her mouth of ashes
Written across her brow in heavy stroke
The cross, the lentern, the falsehood
This room loses light as she gradually declines
On her knees, so many years without touch; lies in place of comfort
Words growing smaller and smaller
A shadow book within a grace freshly dug, till she can see no more but the internal crush of loss
She was an addictive personality who couldn’t get out of her mould, it stuck like gelo, that tendency toward
Melancholy and suicide
If you find her dead you can bet one of her vices is responsible
When she meets people who have not soaked their souls in cigarettes and vodka
Feeling more in the daytime bar than ever something clean and starched
Broken girl parts
Snapped in half before they knew how to stand up
Hers is a sickness, dances in pearls around her neck till pulled tight
Wanting the abyss of psychedelic music and dream of hashish
Intoxicate the pain, numb further urge to destroy what’s left
And push yourself inside me, join the sorrow dot by dot till we both burst
Such is the loveliness of sex in the fulment of grief
Replacing one pain with another small death
The telephone doesn’t ring
She doesn’t call or receive these days
The silence as palpable as the knife she carves her arms into ribbons with
They’ve danced this dance before
There are no rehearsals left, just curtain fall
Think of how it felt, long ago
Before the end, in the middle, lost now
The heaviness of her wanting is blunted by knowing
These people have only their irrevocable actions
Sparring with one another, the blood of first strike hitting white snow in masterpiece
Crimson against a hundred promises, a new form of murder
Sitting, watching herself go through the motions
Good girl who kisses her loved one, tucks in the bed sheets tight
Dreaming of broken glass down her throat, three grey birds and a fingerful of coke
The rage of impotence across flayed landscapes
That flesh and sinew long hung to cure, speaks nothing
Doesn’t forget the rebuke, even as forgiveness is yoked, chain on soft skin
To every ending
Time ticks down without mercy, and if she lives to your age
Just like you, setting the tableaux of your life, there’ll be nothing to say
But the horror of silence before deafening rain
Then she picks up her existing and leaves
Soon it seems, she was never there, just a handful of misspoken words and rage
Drinking clouds, the truth, spares the speaker
She has a generation of distillers and eyes that carry pain as if it were their child
Tonight she won’t be meeting you, she’ll keep on driving
There’s a drop off somewhere, she knows, a fateful road where the turn is sharp
And unexpected
Even for the most familiar driver
It takes a kind of control
She never ever possessed.
