You are the beauty in retrospect
So painful to endure as you

Creep inside of me consensually

Tracing words into the soft palate of my skin

Clasping me in time as you grit your teeth

With no intent of keeping the heart you etch out of my body
In that moment I was

Dying a thousand times over as you felt up my lungs

You were calling each black starry night to take my breath away

I sipped the lust as hatred that felt so sour on my tongue

Like the fresh wine I tasted years ago when everything was too immature not to die
But now, since your grip has slackened
It feels soft like rose petals and



Just like the sheath of the little black dress in my closet, revealing and enclosing



The wilted flower that’s radiantly scented and better-looking than blooming



You are the appeal of an echo of a dirty word whispered that sounds so



Elegant on elder tongues like deeply fermented wine
You are the summer’s shadow



That is dark but intimately shades me from the light



You are stitches reminding me I am renewed like organs soggy and glistening



And I hang onto the lacking lust that has morphed into yearn as if it’s a cherry pit



That I keep like a secret in my mouth still succulent despite the absence of its coats
But you left a cold spot on my skin
In the absence of your stabbing embrace



You are my lips with no cigarette and only burnt taste



Empty and shuddering in growing attraction to the nicotine and



Frigid in comparison without the self-destruction and comfort of



That cigarette’s warm glow so alluringly welcoming and desperately welcomed
So, in wake of this, I will lay alone



In my empty bed, most invitingly wistful



With the damp covers scrunched near me, tucking under my feet and my elbows



Catching my teardrops and welding them over me, enfolding me like the loneliness



That embraces my heart with a sharp panging love too close to the one you lent me
I will constantly murmur to myself in lilting tones
Saying that once in a while it’s okay



To assume that nostalgia is love in its own right and that filling blankets in the hole



Where your body laid and closed the gaps between my fingers



Is okay, too, because they are in fact no more than ribbons that stay



Encompassing me, a bomb, ticking away with the sour absence of your complexities
That are you and are the beauty found in retrospect of tender pain.