I learnt this year
that twelve months is not a long time.

And suddenly I was up staring at the dates
burning past; I
was still sunken in the last wintersleep
when spring danced its dance
and left me watching
from the dark corner
of the bar that my life had become:
the dim lights, and broken hearts,
and the drunken thought of you
rushing in and waltzing out.

I learnt that
you are only as tired
as your last mistake.

And that people only remembered
what they wanted to forget.

I began to measure time
in the ways your laughter changed
from a river-burst resonance of joy,
to a difficult trickle of a mighty
stream
drying up.

Can't you see how
it's a long way
down
from the haunt of the
stars stop shining
when you shut your eyes.

I sometimes
break my lines
blur between happiness
and being awake I
can barely feel anything
when you speak.

It's not quietude, nor
speechlessness it's
the way my mind grows
into a cancer of memories-
how one potentially harmful
dies everyday like clock-
work can't make time
stop the way you
do.

I break between
my lines some-
time pours into your eyes.

We can speak in fine tongues
and drink wine older than our hours
but when it comes to you I
let my tongue tie
itself in a knot.

I tend to
break into my lines
which is why you could never
know that after I said I love
you never came.

When I look at you and realize
somewhere in the clockwork of my heart
I still lose a second for you.

(of broken hearts)

I keep saying that I was alright.
But then everytime I met someone who liked me I
would feel ruined.

Like the tunnels of my throat
has your signal lost
and the anatomy of my heart a hot ****** mess.
Its mixing up the hush from my lungs into my veins
reminding
me of how I couldn't talk you down.

It's like sitting in a boat
and trying to set myself on fire: half-
hearted apologies made me a full
ocean to drown in.
A foot out the door only
lets the light in; some-
how I let you creep
in and now I don't know how
to let myself out
of a maze I didn't mean to design around me
more like a drawer full of clothes
that could maybe hide the shame I
tend to carry;
I am used to the guilt
of having had someone
fall in love with you like
it was an act of charity.
I was within you,
without you
ever knowing the way a heart works.
It is not muscle that'll atrophy of disuse,
it could only maybe
break like Schrodinger's vial
and **** you.
I sit here listening to the clocks of our house
out of sync:
sometimes I was always
a second too late.
I feel lost in these ticks
and these tocks
of all the time we lost; I
was within you,
without
you.