Like Ash From Vesuvius

There are more punches in this silence than there are kisses.  For forgetting.  For walking away when all the thunder cried for reaching closer, for steadying panic, for stilling the splintering night.  I listened to your retreating footsteps long after your shadow was swallowed in the dark and though nothing but ropes could bind this last word to you, I still send it out as though you might hear me in the hell you're bound to.

I have brought my own ribbons, to lace up my fretted memories like the tightening corsets on young ribs, cinching tighter into time like pinching at moribund souls, so little time for whispering, so little time to express evergreen regret.

I can hear you from this window, flung open across the maelstrom, the crushing current stealing my breath as I lean into it, with a center like an endless bottomless heart,  I scatter you there, like ashes out to the center of the sacred, as though you wore robes in life, the robes of a bleeding man.  The robes of a reaching man.  The robes that are stripped in the bleached sleep of the damned.

There is more hunger in the silence than there are dishes for prodigal love.  The rosewater has dried in your care, it has wasted at your door where it was left in all sweetness.  I know you took the dry vessel and cherished wisps of its aromatic dust.  I know because I am always close, after a thousand years of solitude, I still taste your name where the touch used to fall gently.  Like ash from Vesuvius. 

There are more punches in this heart than kisses, and you may be showered in memory by the bruises of either, I will not cosset you in silk threads, nor smother you with unwanted tastes of the light spun across the great divide between twilight and dawn, where the words still hang with stars and your weightless waking is attended by the screaming of crows.  You have long ago let the words reach dust and rot, yet I will resurrect the faintest outline so that you will sleep again, against my side I will prop up your dreams and when you wake I will be no more than than your morning haze, your endless horizon, and separately we will dress our bruises in the light, and mimic the gorgeous spinning of the earth.