Extirpate

You wanted to kill me. You―my executioner and my priest, administering the last rites with reluctant practice. You were the gentle guillotine, and my neck, feeble and emasculated, was your perfect platform.

You wanted to kill me, but my dear love―I have died for you so many nights before last night. I have killed off so many could-have-beens, so many lives, just so I could live this one out for you. For a few velvet-dressed hours, once every blue funk moon―for our cold fingers to meet, for our strangled desires to find their various anchors, for our eyes to search the desert of eternal regret sandstormed over our faces.

You said I wear the smile of a girl but the wounds of a woman. The smile is for your benefit, and the wounds―the wounds, nothing more or less than my unflagging heartbreaks punctuating themselves, over and over and over again, into the yearning skin of this love.

You said you keep your distance because it is better. Your distance. A circumspect, a contigent, a perilous balance between sadness and apathy. No peaks, nor valleys; no wax, nor wane. Just linear time, litigating your loyalities until my loneliness unravels, a ragged hem, begging for your herringbone stitches.

You said you could never make me happy, because you are too selfish, and I am too intelligent to suffer your trespass. And so whatever we share―whatever we are―nothing but a foster love, one that I care for until fate sends it back to its broken home. My hope is a stillborn, an eremitic.

You said all you that you wanted, all that your wary disarticulation would allow you to. You had one random tear for me. I had oceans. How could you kill me again―when I've been drowning myself all this while? Throw me your penny thoughts―coins minted for abuse. Toss them into me, like a wishing well. And listen as they break the surface, slicing into the depthless dark, little zodiacs of our dying friendship sinking into me. Listen, and make a wish upon my broken heart. A fallen star, a heart that has been asphyxiated: both small and bright and never meant.

I walked away from you, like the songs say I must do. And inside every refrain of my swansong lover, beats from this crippled heart lay paused. And within the cocoon of forbidden love, this butterfly life that flutters and calls up thunderstorms of muted longing curls up its wings and quietly dies.

If there is ever hope of a destination with you, it is a hope already maimed and mangled. With you, I'm travelling in a train, coaches driven by my dead. The scenery outside my broken window burns up the sky, their lonely branches bridging up my fragile seasons. I talk to the weather beaten trees, the ones that grow on roads that disappear, with birds that are already memories of the wind.

I walked away from you, but because I have yet to learn to migrate, I am back once again, in the quicksand of your lenient cruelty.