SLAM!

We weren't always together, I muse from my bed--
I didn't always want you to have and to hold.
You told me once that reputation wasn't your fault.
I should never have believed you, but our hands and hair and chlorine and dread
Meshed under Arizona sky. I didn't call you Daniel underwater--my lips shivered in cold.
You were more concerned that I stopped comparing you to Meursault.

You hadn't read Camus, you said--
I believed, but thought it tragic, too. You were so bold,
so soon, so differently literate. You called me Renault;
I supposed I couldn't know what was in your head.
You always thought the same of me, too, but by then we were sold.
You and I, a horrible pair, grains of salt:
Leaving no place we touched bland.

There were flowers and music alive in my head;
There were dreams of mine, so vivid and cold;
You laughed at my thoughts about life, to exalt
That I was fragile, too. "Could I never be dead?"
You implored me. But I was too stricken at misspellings of 'mould'
You didn't understand--you wouldn't. There'd be, for me, no somersault.

You must have been unhappy, I muse from my bed--
That's the only thing I can reconcile with your cursory fold.
How could you have gone so easily? Was it my fault?
I never said a thing--I let you walk away. I let us atrophy. I let us shred.
We couldn't have lasted anyway; I preferred stories to hold.
A book's light burns brighter than any beau, by default.
That's what you couldn't understand.

Lorien