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You choose me - every day. In those quiet and inconvenient ways that I see.

No - this is not a love that once ignited, burned itself to the ground. But, rather, with relentless persistence, a love that practised its way to precision.

Did the stars not breathe a long, slow breath, when we kissed?

I saw a woman sitting at a cafe today.

She had the soft, unsculpted look

Of someone expecting not to be met

She wielded her spoon 

like a wand, mechanical and deliberate,

her porcelain incantations 

stirring

When she brought the cup to her lips

I saw resolute decisions dance there

like gunpowder

She tilted her face to the open sky, 

drew her fingers through her hair,

and parted the clouds.

And when she rose from her chair,

the world had changed - 

How do you rinse away a year?

Scrub the months from under your fingernails. Wash the weeks from the creases of your skin. Wipe the days from the corners of your eyes. Pick the tangled minutes from your hair. Soak your towels and your terrors in bleach.

Here I lay,

deep.

The rising dark,

deeper,

deep.

A bed with a view from the floor.

Prisoner; beneath great swells of Rage

and Regret.

I had not been expecting Grief,

When he found me at 2am.

Weeping quietly in the chair.

He had no need to ask directions;

His howling map was my despair.

His shadow was as long as the ocean,

His comforting scent;

not unlike the buried rain.

He had come to collect 

on some overdue business,

This merchant in sorrow and pain.

He slid his nails down into my cheek

Gently sipping the sound of my tears,

His resonant song

burrows its jaw-clenching pitch

into my throat.

His breath fills my lungs with salt.

The timeless ache of his destruction