Trials Of Separation. in Always Recovering, Never Recovered.

Wordless, soundless, endless, boundless: covert, undercover, as close as a lover, your hips to my pelvis, phantom-palms wrap my waist; refusing to leave me, you won’t be erased. Your fingertips around my ribs, your whisper-breath across my lips, gently brushing my lashes; your hands in my hair, you entirely surround me, you’re everywhere.

The invisible invincible, an echo of intensity, an almost-solid density, you’re everywhere; there’s nothing there, your barren eyes an empty stare of pure disdain; that old refrain, I’m failing both of us again: you’re elusive, evasive, impassive, pervasive; so perpetually, painfully persuasive.

Attempted escape: awkward averted sideways-eyes; beyond their blinker-blinded boundaries you still swim in the peripheries, slipping the shallows of my rockpool mind, shrouded in shadows you hide behind, breathing easy underwater; undeterred, not undermined; the puppet-strings of your manipulation interlaced with my own intonation: your voice inside my thoughts still, forever intertwined.

You’re the oilspill skin of a smooth-mottled mackerel, slick scales daubed and dappled in shapeshifting smears of shadow and shine; streaked shimmers of silver and shadows of steel; so fleet through thought-waters; a swiftly-slinking seabed eel.

You speak in possibilities, the futures that you offer me as softly as the summer breeze, with calm precision and practised ease: one day or soon or after this…, your whispered words a silent hiss, the bruising of a traitor’s kiss; you know as well as I do, we should never flirt again; I cannot be your lover and still less can be your friend, I don’t know how to make you see this has to be the end.

If I give you an inch you will steal my soul, as your hungry embrace instantly swallows me whole, I don’t know how to separate- my thoughts from yours, white-hot with hate- you integrate so perfectly, an intrinsic internal part of me. And all your shady guarantees- simplicity and purity, so resistant to obscurity- are assonance and resonance segued seamlessly in harmony; a heartbeat-rhythm in every line: I keep mistaking your voice for mine.

Shuttered eyes to the future, one day at a time; the tiny steps of this dance, of this tired pantomime. Yet your lullaby-laughter still rings in my ears, you can not be defeated by days, months or years; how do I face forever, that eternal day-parade, when I’m only just pretending, acting out a cheap charade: make sure to keep that mask on, and enjoy the masquerade?

Forever unable to kill the connection with that sparse spectral echo of my former reflection, the wrath of your ruin howled in haunted inflections; because every day, and in every way, I’ll ever be wishing I was somebody else, that clean and empty perfect self: that hollow lie you promised me… the only thing I long to be.