I Only Ever Wrote For You After Our End

I only ever wrote for you after our end

Which meant every poem tasted too much like an overripe obituary on the tongue

But when has guilt ever stopped me from doing something I shouldn't

What has poetry ever done but turn me selfish

Let me repaint everything in shades that complement the tale of my own tragedy

For what is the heartbreak of an artist

If not another poem the world could have done without

You return for me

Once I've finally

Bled your name

Out my veins 

Sometimes there is grief

But most days there is only

The space in my heart

You left behind

Where nothing grows

Anymore

- somedays missing you is an ocean and somedays it is drought

I am a wound

And the longing it will scar

I am the irony of the guilty begging for mercy before the end

And temptation to give it

The ache of dreaming of the redemption you will never let yourself have 

The agony of an artist without a muse

The desire that overcomes you when your center of gravity shifts on a precipice 

The reminder of how final an edge is

How peaceful the end

I am the nights when missing him is longest 

The false memory of his gentleness 

The phantom promise of what could have been if you let yourself be reduced to repentance 

The curiosity of what it would be like to part flesh and bone, to shed your skin and be reborn without this name

The fleeting hope these seams will split and the clock will stop and the mirrors will shatter 

I am poetic justice in all her cruel beauty 

I am the universe in all her lonely infinity

I am the forgiveness that comes for you when you are least worthy of mercy

Just because I can

And this is how it begins

When I rediscover the fear of being undeserving of the things I love

When I forget how to hold the poems on my tounge

When I let the words fester and wilt in my veins

Let the unsaid accumulate in the back of my throat

Dead passages stain my skin shades of neglected potential

When I promise myself I'll end

Or I'll begin

But even I do no trust who I have become

Oh the blood I have shed

Oh the youth I have lost amongst the grief

And for who?

In hopes a river of sorrow, a pathway of scars

Would lead love back

To the hollow parts of me

I carved out

To make room for forgiveness

I deny myself

And the darkness calls to me with all the names my mother said were too soft for me

The shadows think I am delicate and I let them, try to let them convince me too

That somewhere something may yet still think I am worthy of gentleness 

I know

I will never 

Fill the craters

She left in your heart

And I know

When we are over

I will take nothing of you with me

But pieces of her void 

And you will have nothing to remember me by

But the memory 

Of how I could not love you 

Like she did