{ on autumn and falling further }

i lie under starlit sky
and the seasons change in the blink of an eye
i watch as the planets turn
and the old stars die and the young stars burn

---------------------------------

i read somewhere recently

that you cannot expect the person who broke you

to be the one who will put you back together again.

and like every other thing i always knew

but never really knew, the words

dove squarely into me. i felt

their pull, how they made it hard to swallow.

i felt the old wound tingling, felt

the seas swell against the backs of my eyes.

because i did expect that person

who broke me and ran

to run out of breath

and out of road.

i expected him to stop

and realise his error

and turn around,

compelled by how beautiful

he found me once

and retrace his route

and come back.

he didn't have to fix me.

coming back

would have been enough.

(because wasn't i owed

that symmetry?

you who broke will now fix.

that is how fractures are mended:

splinters snapped apart

return to one another.

their edges reconcile.

they lie together again

and are whole.)

so after swallowing those words

my soul knew the taste of but

had never been willing to digest,

i was filled with warnings:

if you break me, leave me

where i fall, do not look back,

do not hold me, do not stay near,

do not remember my beauty. do 

not regret, do not even think of me.

do not wonder if i limped for months,

if i ever opened my mouth to sing again.

and for fuck's sake, do not wish me well,

not even in your dreams. do not hope

i found the arms of another, do not

dare to think my name. because if you do ---

if you carry even a single cell of me

to honor what you know to this day

would have been the love you've

always lived for ---

you will never be rid of me, nor i you.

we'll be stuck in an endless search

for each others' splintered edges,

for an antidote to this agony of breaking;

for the soft grassy well of earth

where we could lie together again,

silent and mending beneath the storm,

forged and fractured to one another

until world's fiery end.

---s.r.