GONE

Gone

 

You thought me carnal didn’t

you? You dreamt you could reach through

my ancient chasm and touch me and find

warm skin, a bit of resistance

to tell you I was there not a hallucination.

 

Oh, how wrong we can be but you didn’t

know. How could you? I concealed the evidence.

How could I tell you otherwise without giving myself

away, away to you away to me?

 

I used to think quatrains could limn my

boundaries with an a b a b rhyme scheme

to make you and others comfortable with my

gauzy absence, but poetry ultimately fails

 

I am no longer me and haven’t been for decades

no not me any more than you or the children

we once had in your womb yes in your womb those

impostors attached themselves only to die out

hollow us out.

 

With each assault, I rallied a bit didn’t I

yes, rallied and screwed my hatred deep

Into the magnetic maw oh yes, I shook my weakened

fist against the odds stacked against me

against you.

 

Diagnosis one atop the next each chronic each

enduring beyond me beyond you each

taking its measure from our dimming horizon

yet wounded grievously I’m here still here?

 

No, my love, I’m not here no not here I have

 shrunk I am a quivering filament dancing

to an elegiac song not heard by you but by

me yes me I hear it thrumming faintly so faintly...

 

We told ourselves decades ago that we’d be ever

together no matter what storms blew in from

my inflamed coast to flatten dreams in skeins of leaking

oil from my fractured crankcase stripped and bleeding

 

Maybe you’ve caught on of late it’s hard to tell

but I keep going on not going on for you for me

I have receded yes receded from the corporeal you

know shrunk from my surface my boundaries

 

I am now boundless shrieking my last despair into

Infinity the Infinity I swore I’d never court but now you

know I lied first to me then to you I lied lied I lied

oh god I lied               

                     

                      please don’t reach for me there is no

way back

 

I’m gone