You Complete Me

I sit in silence and shed the bark from my hide, gouged out by claws of an entity bound to hunger and corrupt.

In quiets of Wednesdays and when faced with questions about time I frame them 

with your face and soundtrack them to your voice. Winding my timepiece with your gilted teeth, fastening my buttons sewn on with bequeathed hair.

My inertia is borne of you immersed in my cells, the decay
interred from uncoupling. A fading wraith, salvaged by whispered
blessings and caressed on plaster.

Sometimes I fear when forward facing – it’s obvious you’ll get gone. I scratch and there’s
no relief, you’re imbuing this existence the meaning
it needs, giving me belief. Driving us, vaulting dread and putting
a glass case on my heart. Keeping flesh on my bones and
filling shoes fashioned from conjecture.

The complexion of your cheeks, eyes and hair are
the palette of my life, painting myself from every shade
of you. You are the neons for which my portrait glows, brushed on
with soft touches as we pass in cramped rooms.

I play cards with myself and imagine a dice rolling, commitments like
chess pieces, moved ever in and out of your favour.

Forever after some fight or some pints

Fears terraced and moated by solemn apprehensions in
missed glances, it was never going to be a good thing, and
if it was it would have to be short lived.

Let me paint those lips a little blacker, give it time to sink in, we
don’t yet know how much gravel sits daintily on each kiss. Holding hands – but never walking, it could only ever be acceptance and surrender.

It’s too quiet, it’s too calm.

You’re fading, no I am: lost in apocrypha and paraphrasing, entreating
absolutes like buzzards gazing over waning efforts. It’s like
you barely know how angry I make you, how fearful I am
to dissolve this mist over the waters.

Walking through life enticed by spotlights, I’m Peter’s shadow, awaiting Wendy’s needle and thread.

The tension is growing, we’re growing rural in our affections and it’s disquieting, I almost don’t want to see your eyes.

Colder now and drizzling from the tyres, coloured like oil under scrutiny.

Force feedings from wind. Streams, opportunistic cattle, green and screams. Monkey nuts crackle. All sounds rattling empty in the halls of my heart, the heart rattling its death in an empty ribcage.

It seemed to fit like toffees into trays, coffee or orange crème chocolates. I posed as my ideal into the downward trajectory of your pity, a ‘we’ no more than an animal carries a wound that they lick.

I’ll destroy it and I can always go; I’ll leave I can just go I’ll pull you out and I’ll forget. Turn the other cheek, forget the shades and commit to self-imposed regret.

A decade of practice, reaching into pockets to claw back the presence you’ve robbed me of, fading into shadow is how I stand in rooms now, and I can’t gather the substance to reform.

You must be, must have always been, you’re a menace to my heroics, a papercut (be)tween my fingers and I’ll not relent in picking at it till I KNOW you’re open and hurting. I lose blood and get weak on the streets or in general, I keep finding cracks and panels to rip off walls. Scraping paint, renovating the facility to be closed and cleansed and abandoned.

Nothing worn in shame, an outright adornment, obvious and flagrant like a garish pelt.

When we and you are all done I’ll wear you, I’ll wear you
and like a coat you’ll keep me through yet more winters,
form to substance, a skin to coalesce on miasma. Drag out
the breathing and gouging and throwing more into the pit, spitting
more petroleum and sparking my tears into the death deluge.

I’ll bury you in the concrete that paves my shins and shaves my sins, no more passing off bare faced lies. I am the ghost at every meal, in every one of my doorways, nought but null and osmosis, derived of a curse to hunger and embody the mirror, into which I can never stare.