I’ve been done with him long enough to know that I want the taste of you in my mouth like fresh honey. I can see your eyes every time I close mine. Falling under your spell

too
too
too

soon after this disengagement. Because I just don’t want you to be a rebound lover. I want to reach for you, apple of my high, sink my teeth into the delicious note of your apparition, still living in me. And I know I can’t have you, is the problem. I know it in every one of the molecules that collides within my body as they each scream your name.

I’ve not the faintest clue how to get you out of my system. Explain to me what makes someone sit around and read old correspondence over and over, smelling pages, draping paper across my arm as if I can squeeze your touch out of ink.

I can’t be like this. I absolutely cannot be like this. I cannot be brought to tears remembering the heat of your voice in my ear. Reason, sanity, unclouded straight-thinking – these are the things I ought to be clinging to, ought to be playing songs about and singing out loud. Songs like Slowly, Surely, I walk away from

but. Little “b” but. I can’t walk away from you, run, think, speak.

My first mistake was becoming friends. The first time you re-inhaled my voice I could hear the caution in yours. Like I’d be like danger to touch. Like our smoke meant fire. Like you knew better than to sip my poison.

And it would, is, does. That was the moment I swallowed any doubt that leaving him was right. And I didn’t know you were leaving her.

Yet from the first electric feather of your apprehension, I was back there again, back on my back drinking every word you ever said, letting you destroy me, recreated with your softly uttered syllables, whispering me into frenetic spasms that bordered on pain with their intensity.

How is it that I’m writing you again, writing poetry? – I can only write poetically, write poetry when I’m in love, with an idea, with a song with a

shit.

It is expressly forbidden to love you. I can’t even handle the idea that our skin might brush past each other in coming months. Or that our vocal vulnerability would waft in neighboring air. We can’t meet, ever again. Right now I’m losing control of myself, right now, thousands and thousands of miles split from you my heart wails a pattern in your chest, begging for release.

We must not be lovers. Both our worlds would cease in that shower of delight. And as the ebbing embers of each echoed eternity eventually eclipsed every elevation, all of the stars finger-painting in the sky would point at us

ending the world
ending the world
ending the world.