My somewhat (very) superstitious mind likes to believe that the poetry I’ve written over the years are prophetic. A vignette of a future yet to come. To be more academically accurate: my subconscious realization of what might inevitably happen manifests itself in written word.
I wrote this with him in mind. It would be more than a year before we ended.
We remember each other in fragments.
Years later the 4 by 6 glossy you’ve kept is nothing. She is looking at a separate you and has a smile you don’t recognize. You scratch guilt thoughtlessly along the edge where a date (of what?) was scribbled. Her blue-black ink, immutable from time and travel, doesn’t smear.
Instead it comes back to you in the most heedless moments: autumn in the subway, your own face flickering back at you like a broken picture-film. There in a panic is her: above, the clink of gold against teeth; a slide of citrus sealing in feinted sleep, your own laughter filtered in a cloud of hair without subtitles.
You let it rumble through you – freight train of years past – and surfacing, find yourself the same person as before.
•••
I have not written, properly written, for a long time. If I were to put a date to it, since I’ve met HS. The syrup of love is sweet and heavy, it cloys the literary of my brain into lethargy.
There is no want, no tension between our wants. There is no spiralling into insanity (anymore). There is, by extension, no juice to fuel my poems. For they are always truthful, always an extrapolation of what I see feel think or touch.
What can I write about that isn’t trite? The way holding your hand relaxes every atom of my being? Or how we laugh at the same beat of a joke and there is nothing I cannot say to you?
In our relationship, I’m the one with all the words.
I tell you, in the minutiae, why I like you, what I like about you, how I would feel without you, what life was before, with, after you.
Your words, though they are much, are not for feelings. You show in actions how you feel. But you let me and my myriad of words do what they want to. I’m not sure if they do anything for you, but you listen patiently and carefully anyway.
•••
I wonder when I’ll next write. Why do I only ever get inspired by loss, death, or insanity? Sometimes a combination of all three.
Q 
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