Reliving/Relieving

 It goes like this:

Looking down the chasm

Expunging liquid remains

The once-a-month vacuum

Where sharp edges soften.


I’d spent the night wading waist-high

With mucoid utterances sliding

To half-absent friends.

Leaky-tap eyes. Lips drawn up as curtains

The imbecile’s persistent half-smile.


Remember, then, my atom-splitting in-breath

In the minuscule hour your hands-

Your estranged hands- crossed the length of No Man’s Land

To hold back my hair.

Knuckles planting a kiss on the nape of my neck-


Is it Pity that instructs you?

Does she guide your hand carefully down my spine

Mark it FRAGILE, heaving, shaking-ugly.

My back to view, but seeing straight through

In shades of shame-stained glass.


Or do you quake, too, under the weight of what could have been?

And the unmouthed words that halo us, solitary Us,

In the dim bathroom glow

Marooned from distant downstairs

In a closed-door country where we have never hurt.


Is it that you want me, lolling head, sobbing shoulders-

Whilst your other She drapes and fawns in the kitchen?

A conditional tense unspilled tryst 

Suspended-second ceasefire left unanswered

For not once in the mean shock of your touch did I turn and meet your gaze.


In its wake, the scene plays out behind me a myriad ways

I have you infatuated, embarrassed, enfettered, indifferent.

A prism I inspect at leisure, catching shapes of afternoon sun-

At night, a tidal wave I cannot outrun.



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