When the urge overcame me, the desire to commit some act of terrible, enduring beauty, you were nowhere to be found. I caught fire like a prayer of grain alcohol and spray adhesive, like the soul of a flag driven to war. While I burned in unkind rooms and that eternal reach of night, your absence blinded me, blazing away in my mind. It was a theft of reality, a shifting of seemings too profound to weather. So while I flayed page after page with snips and shards of meaning, spelling everything out with that dumb alphabet of hope and heart and feared oblivion, you lingered as a cypher behind each poem and letter. My mouth filled with the sweet stab of remembered kisses, all salt and warmth and sudden endings. When I spoke it was with a throat laden with ghosts and dreams.

The desperation of settled bets and earned hell overwhelms. History becomes fate, urgency need, and all the words bleed into the meaningful pauses between them. Art speaks volumes; failed attempts at art speak more. Such pointless striving, such fearsome spitting, such pointed want: the scale seems balanced towards the side of lack. The furious attempts towards beauty, the moth beaten bulbs of an empty porch. That late arrival that will never come. That letter left unwritten, never sent. Lost children and buried blossoms. The lingering ache of love, once love fades.