Tumult

It is precisely the fighting.  Broken words and broken hearts, you hold someone you knew in you hands and they are dust; dark as resin, nonsense clings to some intangible and immutable truth.  It is the face of something twisted that hides under seething skin.  Red devil, red eyes, you work your tears through.  It is the question, the battle, the bags of hot malice that I drop on the remnants of a conscience, yours and mine, what we think is past tense.

And the present is hurt, a lock in your chest, weights on your waving arms, heaving and retreating, our glinting teeth are sharper now; I will eat your fondness for what was soft has hardened.  And it is impossible, venomous, vindictive... If only we would stop, stop and drag our dripping cassocks into the river, stop and wash in silence.  Please lets be silent.  Please let us stop.

Et Je me suis trompee.  I have made a mistake, let me take the seconds back and let me turn.  And this is what I told you.  That was my mouth, my muscles moving, my face flashing inches away.  This is the hurt that I have caused.  And this is the pain that shows, now in your elbows, now in your soul.

This is what we did together, this is what we made.  This is the hate, quick, lurid, that we built in our bodies?  our bastion, made of stone, made of coal, our touches, once yielding, are rigid.  What you wrapped around me was a fleeting untruth.  This is what we chose to do, and these are the consequences of our impetuous decisions.

But it is over, and what remains?  A void where a picture once hung... between the yellowed wallpaper, where the full pattern, colors still bold, shows, something good is gone; something that cannot be replaced or reconstructed... for nothing fits the woolly, amorphous outline of a complex and  affectionately singular, now damaged, bond.