You have run me through like a Robber Baron

I have come to the end of my skin. I reach out, I am sure I had some more once. It's all falling away now you see, just like in the days when I first knew you. I, who only ever saw the blood in people, fell down in your syllabine silence as we wound in and in together. I would forget the shape of your face as soon as I turned from you. You were like a vortex which sweeps away a universe so that it may exist. You moved only upon the waves of intuition. Now it is the same. I see the blue pores on the back of your neck, but I forget the shade of hair which curled above it. I hear the echo of your mouth in the moments after you finished a sentence, dropped low like the alien call of a whale. I scrabble for the frame that held you, splintering like bore wood. You are dissolving into limpid nothing. And compliantly, I dissolve too.


I grind together as if made by churned sea glass. Time has gone wrong, it has left too much in me, I clank and clutter through days, waiting. I am of course well armed with well meaning words and philosophies. Hopeless as a dance, piled on me like casseroles to be frozen and defrosted as needed. I am to glean a lesson. I am to put myself back out there. I am to move on. I remain a haunted doorway. The sea has drunk what it could of me, and now has thrown me out.

I do not know which way to look. I roll a pen between my forefinger and thumb, unsure what it was I was ever supposed to do with it. You and I long ago disbanded with the casing of the world. How could I help shattering in your pale camellia smell, which spun so insistently around me?

I reach out, I am sure there was some more once.

There is nothing.

Kate