I don't think that I have the power
to relate what I know of you
through the prism of a narrative.
I tried to tell your story yesterday
in my carefully constructed
grammatically correct way.
Failing miserably at a proper
biography, as you deserve,
I must recount what I know
in the only way I can.

Within my heart live a series of images,
memories burned into me
by the intensity of our meetings
and the ferocity of the late night
phone calls born of that chemical
with no name, equal parts sorrow and flame.

It was easy to find you,
but God it was hard to leave.
From the first kiss to the last
and everything in between.

I don't know how many times
you called me crying so hard
that you couldn't even speak.
How many times you told me
that you wanted to die without
even a second thought for what
those words did to my heart.
I accepted it all though,
every single strand of you,
gave you all the love I knew how.

There is no word for the sorrow
that comes with knowing that
I couldn't save you from yourself.
It didn't matter how many razors
I took from your trembling hands,
how much blood I wiped from your thigh
or how many tears I shed for you.

At the end, that last night and morning
just a week ago now,
you looked right through me
with eyes that didn't see.
I took you in my arms and there was nothing.
The girl I knew and loved doesn't exist anymore.

I'm sorry that you had to die in my heart,
but know that I loved you enough
for it to be killing me inside.
I guess that the boy in me is gone now,
since I walked away anyway.
I didn't cry, I don't regret it.
You're just one more ghost after all.

How to explain what it feels like,
when your soul is crumbling within,
to watch your possible futures meet eachother during the same night, and know that in order to survive,
you must leave one behind.

Here I am
waiting for the whiskey
to stop being coy
and finally kick in.
Rome is burning outside
but the flames haven't
crept near yet.
Front row seats
to the end of an era
that I'll soon have to pay for.
I can already smell the smoke
and see the angry glow
against the weeping sky.
But I have some time yet
before the air gets hot
and the streets become
screaming rivers of humanity.
Bearing witness now
to the weeping heart
and fate's feckless whim.
Outside, Rome is burning
as the tide of time reaches
out to find the high water mark.
All for a dream
a half formed and
half thought impulse,
the urge to conquer
not a woman or a nation
but the whispers of the psyche.
Soon now the fat lady
will sing her rusted heart out
and I'll see the last great age
fall to the caprices of a power
that I will never comprehend.
Rome is on fire
and in that destruction
might something else
be born?
The histories of nations
the folly of man
the lives of the great
replayed again within
the lives of those
whom I love.
The center is indeed crumbling
and we of the flesh,
we cannot hold.

I guess it's a hard thing to break down and accept, this understanding that one has burned that white picket fence and one story ranch home down. This septic knowledge that the woman who loved you is now, at this very moment probably snorting another line of fantastic yay. I'd like to think that I did well by her in the years since we first met. But I know I'd be wrong. The truth is, I'm too much of a broken child to understand love when it snaps it's fingers in front of my face. She trusted me, needed me, and I ran as far and hard as I could to get away from what we meant to eachother. I thought I was brave and strong, but I was just a coward in the end. I know, deep inside

These being the words of a tired poet
desperately fighting to rekindle a dying flame.
This being the end of an era spent chasing shadows
and loving weeping ghosts.

Take this heart within your hands
before the body that belongs to it fades.
Do it now, go on and take it while
the light still breathes in this place.

My time here is ended, if I ever really
was of here to begin with, perhaps more of
a wanderer than I realized in those blue sky
days when our love had a body and a soul.

But you, your time is now and it is a perilous one,
in this world slipping away, turning inward.
So carry this heart with you into the night,
talisman of the old world, last of the fading light.

I can tell you about the girl.

Her freckles were beige constellations,
and her voice was husky and rasped
like birds before the churning of a storm.

She was weird and laughed at everything I said -
which made her even weirder,
because I'm only funny in certain photos
and in certain clothes.

Her left arm was covered in scars and burns.
"As you can tell, I'm right handed," she said.
Arthritis surrounded her wrists and other joints,
and all I could think about were my
grandmother's arthritis crippled hands,
and if the girl would thank the arthritis, one day,
for no longer allowing her to self-harm.

One of her feet were bigger than the other
and, when she walked, she would lose balance.
"I'm not sure if the world is too fast
or if I'm too slow. Then again," she winked,
"it's probably because of my feet."
I liked her because she treated me like a person,
but didn't take me as seriously
as I took myself.

I struggled with self-respect
and she struggled with a drug addiction.
Her arm was needle park
and sometimes she missed ******
more than she missed me.

She wasn't the type of girl to shake
without her drugs -
she'd, instead, talk about them
like they were old friends.
She understood them
more than she understood herself.

After a few months of ***
and, "I'll be sad when you leave,"s,
I called her my girlfriend
and she smiled.
Flecks of speckled angles, bright,
I saw her, first, she accepted
my night.

Five days later,
she overdosed on morphine.
I picked her up.

Her eyes were glazed over.
I said, "I love you,
but this is *******."
She cried and said,
"Forgive me."

I lain in bed, next to her -
next to the avoidance of death.
She asked how I was
and I said, "Everything I write is ****,
but I'm glad I can write ****** poetry
about how we'll be okay."

She asked, "We will be okay, right?"

I hope.

Here it comes again,
that feeling known so well,
when your heart hurts
and things start to stretch.

The machine you're trying to type
on is starting to fail,
the words you're trying to speak
are sounding cheap and ill used.

There is something you know,
deep down inside,
some seriously heavy hitting truth
trying to claw it's way out of you,
a drop of strange, a hint of deja vu.

Pulling back from the lies you've told
to yourself, afraid to see what is...
and what ought to have been.

I'm afraid to go through that door,
shedding the faces and skins I've worn
for so long, but I know that I have to
open it and walk through standing tall.