Skeletons.

I’ve got that unholy ache in between every finger, around each joint, and in the black space on the back of my eyelids. Back then I filled up on dreams and let them slosh around carelessly/lazily in too deep a well. These days each heartbeat is met with the resounding clang of a tin interior filled with too many metallic organs. That stillness, as full as the moon, settling slowly into the bottom of the stomach. (“I’m feeling restless,” she said.) Her courage curled up in a ball and surrendered. The heart retreats (a moral retreat?). Like a sink full of water, spilling over.

My ghost lover, he haunts me still.
I slip/downward spiral – how familiar you are to me. The treachery of my own soul/heart, its familiarity (longing) to the touch of those hands. I speak his language fluently. (Those warning signs still spill over lips [now colder (pressed tighter) with age]. It is well with my soul!) This phantom, he does something to the very fabric of my being/upsets the delicate inner balance. He makes the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand on end/leaves my mouth dry & tongue thick and heavy. I have a poisonous adoration for you/a reverence for your malicious ways.

You are Always mine, and Never. [[He’s never been so thin before. I whimper into your heaving frame and my cries echo, skeletal. (Such brittle bones and paper skin and the sickness of your shade. Spider threads, dripping over your arms in strings, cobwebs that no amount of sweeping could tidy. A tangible network/the path your blood takes = further evidence of the lifestyle that was loved and left behind.) ]] We set down roots in the same place, and our different seeds grew upwards in the same direction. I meditate on the length of your limbs and in these dreams, I contemplate the slender line of your back.

He is changed from The Last Time. I have to begin again, committing him to memory {to have drawn him from every angle possible, and spent a lifetime counting his marks & branding/adding new ones to the pot. (Leaving two capital As in the valleys of your clavicles)}. I sometimes ponder the ratio between Time Spent Staring Into Each Other’s Eyes versus The Rest of the Time. Those images singed/scorched into my mind – the things I was able to make out in the blackness/black hole/bleak hole into which we retreated (which grew into our own personal outer space/ a darkness beyond contemplation.) our solitary light/our solitude was the most beautiful _____.

And it’s Time, Time, Time/

It is comparable to seeing, for the first time, a person whom you’ve had pictures of all your life. The things I can’t remember tell the things I can’t forget. The thrust of your hips/Contemptuous and sensuous was our love. [The staring/Soul-searching: it gives us away (our daily bed)].

I’m afraid that I could Love you blindly or without reason. I’m afraid that I could Love you against everything I believe in. This resolute emotion that fights back, all teeth and claws. The Love that shakes itself awake, and sometimes screams (at you). Never wanted anything so much, with so much desperation, as to maintain a cataclysmic union – collapsing into bed, breathless, at night, uncertain and restless and ferociously glad to not have to be without the other. You are going to be my downfall. Hard times are ahead.

All the same:
If I have to die, at least let it be at your hand.
Take me with you when/however you go.