There’s a space inside

The last of my love poems, at least to date and at least for the foreseeable future, is to do with what resulted from five years spent going from one guy to the next: three significant relationships and an unknown number of fast flings somewhere nearing a couple dozen.

But the three substantial encounters, lasting three months (+ three months ten years earlier), two and a half years (he’s the subject of “His eyes amber, grey and green…” and “Of Zeus and Ganymede“), and most recently two and a half very intense months, took a lot out of me but also taught me deeper lessons about my own and our species’ capacity for negligence.

That last one broke that part of me that craved a partner. Billie Holiday’s “You Let Me Down” is the best musical description of that experience I’ve heard. Fiona Apple’s “Periphery” is a close second. (But they’re pretty obviously related.)

It’s his birthday today. Here’s to him. Here’s to what isn’t.

Anyway, the last of the love poems:

There’s a space inside 28 May 2021

	There’s a space inside of me I’ve pushed
		under the surface,
	a barren blackened hellscape torched
		by another’s self-fashioning

	There’s a space inside within my heart
	like when a sheet of thickset ice
	propelled by Boreas’ relentless force
	fragments from pressure accumulated
	and the shore is fathoms thick with it,
	the remnant boulders heaping,
	grinding quaking splitting.

	How the sounds of their fury
	push the blood through the veins
 	of this tossed-aside body
	to this tossed-aside mind,
	as if a mocking wasted effort.

	Shrieking shards, they howl
	like women veiled for grief
	 wailing at men’s demise,
	as if to let their wailing
	be enough that I needn’t.

Recent Poems