Re-live – a poem

Too many lonely nights I think of you. 

I sit in the blackness of my mind and conjure you with dark magic. 

I call you forth from yellowed memories, like photos in the sun. 

You are less than a ghost, a memory of a memory, the feel of you like cobwebs along my skin. 

The warmth of your sun distant as I spiral into the void far beyond you. 

I am replaced by another world after I lost my axis and spun away. 

So far away. 

Should it shame me that I think of your skin, your lips, your body?

Should it shame me, the comfort of your almost forgotten flesh?

Perhaps it should but I’m not. 

I remember your laugh. 

A little. 

I remember your favorite restaurant. 

Some. 

I remember the long nights we lay in bed talking and talking and talking. 

I remember that. 

But how can candles compare to a pyre?

I sit and think of you. 

And wonder, wonder wonder. 

And little else. 

And I wish for another moment, another night, to re-live you one more time. 

Knowing I don’t know what I want. 

That I don’t want what I want. 

I want the fantasy of the want. 

I know that given another night I would lose the moment and notice the smell of onion on your lips, the taste of cigarette on your tongue. 

I would notice how your eyes wander as we are together, towards the clock and then the door. 

I would realize that that was the last time and would wonder if it was passion that drew you near one last time or if it was pity. 

I would want to ask – do you – when you tell me of your love. 

I would mourn the moment you rose naked to clumsily dress in the dark and, planting a kiss on the side of my mouth, tell me you love me, as you look away from my gaze. 

And I would know. 

And I would know. 

And I would know. 

This is the end.

And maybe I already knew. 

That was the end. 

So do I go back further, to the first and not the last?

When we were but tipsy, intimate strangers, with the only connection our intermingled bodies?

Or the middle, where we knew what one another liked but not what the other wanted?

No. 

I suppose not. 

Because I don’t want to break the magic with reality. 

I don’t want to see behind the curtain. 

I don’t want to know how the trick is done. 

I don’t want to know the truth behind your words. 

I prefer to sit in the audience, a child enamored of the glamor, happy to be tricked and fooled. 

I prefer you how you are. 

Fading, fading, fading, and one day gone.
I prefer the you my heart knows, my mind believes in, and my body mourns. 

I prefer the you that I want you to be and not the you that you are, away and someone else’s star. 

So I will sit in the blackness of my mind and hold the dream of you so close that it hurts to know that every time I let you go I lose a little more of you, but happy for what there was and for what there is left. 

Because at least there’s that. 

At least there’s that.