You see me a dozen times a day, on the train, in the street, in our favourite café; disappearing just as the likeness turns and you find it’s another stranger with hair similar to mine.
We only really see each other at the bottom of every glass, when there’s nothing left inside but the emptiness of where something that had been intoxicating was consumed.
I walk out past the ellipsis of the things you meant to say. I swim in the moonlight of all our daydreams and regrets. Your lips move in the night, sometimes, and casual lovers guess it’s the name of a broken heart; a ghost, a spectre; a remorseful phantasm you wouldn’t dare voice lest I appear in your room.
You examine the punctuation of my unrealized motives like footprints left in the sand, but my intent is fleeting — vanishing under a tide of silence. Though, I like to imagine you emerging from the sea of my subconscious, dripping wet with my unspoken desires. Do I even remember your name or did I tuck it away somewhere under the floorboards? Maybe it calls to me at all hours of the day, and at night I just try to moan loud enough — in someone else’s arms — to stifle the syllabus repeated over and over again, like the beats of a tell-tale heart.
I sleep in the TV, counting backwards, forgetting names and places while the lights of a prism dance across your eyes. I’m being forgotten one daydream at a time. (I passed you a note, perhaps, folded three times and scented. You kept it in a shoe box. But you can’t remember where you hid it and we’re no longer friends on facebook.)
You dream in black and white these days, our technicolor fantasies of happy endings eaten up by the static of absence. (We don’t burn bridges anymore, we just break links. We don’t forget things, we just delete the evidence; the memories.)
I hide in your radio waves, humming nursery rhymes and hymns while the motorways unravel beneath you. Your job is a puzzle box. There were three ways in and all the exits were hidden. They have coffee club on Tuesdays and once a month you sing karaoke. You are fading out in echoes. (Maybe, we carved our initials into a tree. It was cruel you thought, but you crossed that field every time you walked home alone. One day you came to realize the names in the tree were warped out of shape, and you had long sold all our toys.)
You broadcast from a tower that only amplifies the white noise of regret. On a station that’s only available from the hours of too tired to exist and too awake to simply disappear. Your distorted melody lulls me to a half-dreaming state. My eyes close, behind the wheel, for just long enough to crash into my every day life. (Maybe I used that tree for firewood.)
I haunt the isles of the supermarket. There are phantoms between the prices and spectres hidden in the packaging. Your days are catalogued by the ways you prepare your vegetables. Your mornings are fibre and glucose. Your weekends are three types of fruit. You are falling one kilojoule per second. (Possibly, we spent one entire night talking to each other. You fell in and out of quick dreams still speaking to me, our fingers laced and our heads pressed together. You told me everything that night and now you can’t even remember my middle name.)
You indulge in well balanced meals of jealous speculation, beautiful plates that I’ve prepared and left at the tomb of my affection. That angry ghost that is damned to walk the limbo of unrequited sentiment. It belongs to no one, but is always bound to someone. (and if that night did happen, I swear that nothing I said is half as profound as the silence we share now.)
I whisper from the reflection in the mirror. You have grown old and alone in your reflections. It looks like you’re moving but you are always standing still. Your eyes seem further away than you remember. (Perhaps I looked deep into them years ago and told you I saw your soul. Perhaps you believed me, before you blinked, before I smiled.)
You are a spiteful ghost haunting a living skeleton. I tuck you into the grave of my forgetfulness, you lock me in the closet of your memory.
We only really see each other at the bottom of every glass, when there’s nothing left inside but the emptiness of where something that had been intoxicating was consumed.
I walk out past the ellipsis of the things you meant to say. I swim in the moonlight of all our daydreams and regrets. Your lips move in the night, sometimes, and casual lovers guess it’s the name of a broken heart; a ghost, a spectre; a remorseful phantasm you wouldn’t dare voice lest I appear in your room.
You examine the punctuation of my unrealized motives like footprints left in the sand, but my intent is fleeting — vanishing under a tide of silence. Though, I like to imagine you emerging from the sea of my subconscious, dripping wet with my unspoken desires. Do I even remember your name or did I tuck it away somewhere under the floorboards? Maybe it calls to me at all hours of the day, and at night I just try to moan loud enough — in someone else’s arms — to stifle the syllabus repeated over and over again, like the beats of a tell-tale heart.
I sleep in the TV, counting backwards, forgetting names and places while the lights of a prism dance across your eyes. I’m being forgotten one daydream at a time. (I passed you a note, perhaps, folded three times and scented. You kept it in a shoe box. But you can’t remember where you hid it and we’re no longer friends on facebook.)
You dream in black and white these days, our technicolor fantasies of happy endings eaten up by the static of absence. (We don’t burn bridges anymore, we just break links. We don’t forget things, we just delete the evidence; the memories.)
I hide in your radio waves, humming nursery rhymes and hymns while the motorways unravel beneath you. Your job is a puzzle box. There were three ways in and all the exits were hidden. They have coffee club on Tuesdays and once a month you sing karaoke. You are fading out in echoes. (Maybe, we carved our initials into a tree. It was cruel you thought, but you crossed that field every time you walked home alone. One day you came to realize the names in the tree were warped out of shape, and you had long sold all our toys.)
You broadcast from a tower that only amplifies the white noise of regret. On a station that’s only available from the hours of too tired to exist and too awake to simply disappear. Your distorted melody lulls me to a half-dreaming state. My eyes close, behind the wheel, for just long enough to crash into my every day life. (Maybe I used that tree for firewood.)
I haunt the isles of the supermarket. There are phantoms between the prices and spectres hidden in the packaging. Your days are catalogued by the ways you prepare your vegetables. Your mornings are fibre and glucose. Your weekends are three types of fruit. You are falling one kilojoule per second. (Possibly, we spent one entire night talking to each other. You fell in and out of quick dreams still speaking to me, our fingers laced and our heads pressed together. You told me everything that night and now you can’t even remember my middle name.)
You indulge in well balanced meals of jealous speculation, beautiful plates that I’ve prepared and left at the tomb of my affection. That angry ghost that is damned to walk the limbo of unrequited sentiment. It belongs to no one, but is always bound to someone. (and if that night did happen, I swear that nothing I said is half as profound as the silence we share now.)
I whisper from the reflection in the mirror. You have grown old and alone in your reflections. It looks like you’re moving but you are always standing still. Your eyes seem further away than you remember. (Perhaps I looked deep into them years ago and told you I saw your soul. Perhaps you believed me, before you blinked, before I smiled.)
You are a spiteful ghost haunting a living skeleton. I tuck you into the grave of my forgetfulness, you lock me in the closet of your memory.
___________
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