There's a melody that I cling to when
We share a presence,
Attempting to recreate, to salvage our former
Sense of selves.
Do you know what I feel within ourselves?
A sad, pained love that aches within,
A moment stuck in time.
Tarred and feathered, maybe, but preserved
All the more for it.
You will haunt me like a ghost
With vestiges of our old humour
Our old comfort;
Seeping slowly, with sick, sweet mercy
Into tenuous moments we
Can't recreate, can't capture.
You - who raised me, who gave me this
Soul that I have all but
Lost, that has all but
Been demolished
In the weather of time, the rending scars
Of desolation.
To salvage what you shaped in me,
To hold my own,
To entwine you in the old cadences, our melody of
Gentle codependence, subtly interwoven.
Fear of jagged incongruities,
Anticipation holds us back.
I vent anger at your inconsistency
We tunnel through the tangled web of time,
The lucidity of a love tortured and marred.
Pores of light find gaps to tunnel through
Dapple the mesh of memory, the aching fabric of song.
The cold clarity of our friendship
Comes in gusts with the frost of a
White winter night.
Each pinprick of light echoes a
Fond glance into shared humanity
A humanity forged in shared adolescence.
We broke the bonds of patronizing oppression
Of our crude self-restraint
Burned boundaries, both within and between
Along with the sallow skin around our mouths,
As we drank from a bottle of 151
In the midst of a cold desert moonshine.
Drowned doubt and self-governance in
Whispers of sweet smoke;
Defied the gravity of reality with
Endless nights walking, syncopating, melding in the
Balmy, fluid summer air.
Lost loves and found strength in
Jolting cups of drip coffee.
Learning, subliminally, to fit each other like puzzle pieces;
We were always almost perfect;
And then time ground us niches.
My heart nested in your chest and
Once I cried for you, in your brother's bed.
Like time can rend, can it seal;
It's not time, it's space, the compartments
Carved for new selves, distanced from
Old ghosts.
Those niches never fill so perfectly
You will haunt me like a ghost -
Don't look at me that way.
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