Scream

Sometimes it feels like entombment,
Loving you when all I have on hand is
Bone ground to that fine ash
That slipstreams through my fist
No matter how crushing my grip.

I am walled up in a solid, windowless tower
Of memento mori and the concrete pages
Of your lost scrawls across the fields
I can see, but cannot tread.

My body has become your temple:
All gleaming stone no pick can break.
You needed me stolid, once —
And once I trod past that line,
I knew there would be no return journey.

My bridges burnt bright behind me
And the smoke obscures the path
Beneath these feet that plod on
Though my restless, renegade heart
Insists on staying there,
Cocooned in the cold ash
That was once love,
Was once fucking,
Was heartless, feverish and brutal
Just as you told me to love you.

My fortress will not fall.
On some days
I don’t want it to.
Today is not one of those days.

So I sift all I have left of you
With half-buried memories
Of skin and bone and sinews
That once joined me to you.

It once was love.
It once was fucking.
It remains
Heartless
Feverish
Brutal.

It kills me
And I do not die.