Our parting was not a clean catastrophe;
in our wake
our sundered lips left no clear break
to mark the boundary between ruin and remembrance
Unfolding like unnatural disaster, it remained:
a lovelorn saga
a cruel accounting of insults,
of aftershocks and echoed arguments
of hearts breaking over and over,
and over again, so quickly beaten out of sequence
And in the dry bureaucracy of hindsight
after months of awkward words and silence,
a midnight phone call left us marking up the damage
in a soft and brutal currency:
callous words unsaid that trickled down a gradient of loss
callous a fleeting hour of contact from the lonely battered edges
callous of a no-man’s land of love that we left scarred and black and festered
callous In our wake, we left
a landscape barely recognised
pathetic patterns razed in marble mazes,
rubble broken beyond shape
and worn beyond our age’s worth, and
In our wake, our fractured shadows lay
in mirror cracks that twisted
through the graceful lines of long lost architecture
lies that danced in schisms over empty ventricles and
wrung foundations weakened by the flood
until the ruptured bedrock bore no trace of what had stood,
callous so firm before it
Uncomfortably Eloquent 