25 Cent Keychain

Your car door shuts, with a sense of urgency it has not held before.
The sound of your boots stomping up the stairs,  
once so familiar,  
seems foreign for this time place and in conjunction with my last image of you  
which remains imprinted on the insides of my eyelids  
and dominates once-black stillness that claims me when I lie sleepless.  

And why, why did you return if the only thing that brought you back
(as you reminded me, mumblingly)
was that 25-cent key-ring, so hopelessly lost
among the churned, spiraling patterns of the wall-to-wall carpeting?  
Its misplacement was not significant so many months ago
when you still frequented these floors.

If nothing tangible holds you to this place  
(which is seeped so thickly with you and I  
that the air can be breathed in and the memories, fleetingly, revisited)  
then why do your viridescent eyes follow the movements of my face?  
Your pupils swaying, like the tears which draw looping curtains to frame my false courageous front.

You will leave me once again, solitary, to face your shimmering picture in the dark.
I will accept my fate among sinners
and the knowledge that I violated the sanctity of these beige walls
when Timberland boots, newer than yours
sneakily tread these halls
late one lonely December.

Oh, you can't convince me that this place held nothing to you  
when moths gathered outside the screens to watch this love unfold.
Six months before the folly of my loneliness
before his dark boots in the hall
your trembling fingers did trace the sunken, piercing bones of my lower back.  
As though to heal their source.  
As though you, or anyone could.

This place held something to you
when the moths fluttered in the June darkness
and your fingers moved to their imperceptible beat,
to the tremors of my shaking heart.