Time stands still in your chest.
You locked them all away.
Never spoke a word. Never listened.
Superimposed the words from her mouth
With something else that never mattered.
You took her body for granted, the songs
She sang to herself, to you, when she cried
And couldn’t sleep. You left her on the living
Room floor. Knives on the plate. The squeezed
Dead juice of a tomato. The paper that cut
From the ice cream. Your packaged heart.
The television with the sounds erased.
Her hair flabbergasted against the screen.
She jumped straight into the night sky
And feared you more. The way you hold her.
The way your stomachs collide. The fingers that
Feel like double the natural amount.
She stands amidst a thousand raindrops and whispers
To the dead.
She looks at the movement of mud and believes
That there is hope. Sees the deafening stillness
Next door. Would they ever know? The sheets
Drenched in gutted secrecy? Heartache unrecognised.
The tumbling steps after he had existed within her.
Rolled around in her flesh like a dog.
Licking her scent off his hands, her sweat attached to his chest.
She thought about the decomposition within photographs
That showed a past that was lost and vanished.
The faces that once held her above water, the insignificance
Of loneliness. She’d hope to stick her fingers into the paper,
Into the marshlands of a life already lived, memories to handle right,
And people best to keep at bay.
Croque-Melpomene 