eight days and
one year and
two months and
every number multiplies with memory
thick, bright, full of love and flavor and
the flavor of love
innocent lust
phone conversations in a forest and sudden
stabs of regret.
Curls of it.
Wetting my hair.
Tangling my fingers into worried weary fleshy knots.
Breaking them.
The worst part isn’t that I’m here-
I don’t mind here-
at least I’m still here-
it’s that I know exactly how I got from there
to here.
No big mystery.
No sad song, what did I do
wrong,
time flies when you’re
breaking hearts
doesn’t it?
I know who I am.
I know what I’ve done.
and I can recount for you the order of events from the very first time I felt needed/wanted/loved all the way through cups of hotel coffee, maps and melting ice, green tea in the middle of the night, the first “yes”, all the “yes”s after that, and the passionate debates, every inch of the world we explored, to the slow and tender dismantling of a false reality, the reality of distance and time, and my final flourish of hatred and self-pity that so ineffectively burned down my memory, leaving nothing but the future-
a future in which I create and destroy
and try and fail and fail again,
fall in love and try to want
anyone
as good as you, the king of my Saturdays,
my poetry, the king of
my guilt.
No, from there
to here is not a
mystery.
I know who I am.
I know what I’ve done.
But how to go from here
to someplace else
is still
unclear.