Loves Like This

I try to forget the feel of him underneath my skin
The promise of salvation smothered in sin
Or the way he tore my life asunder with a crooked grin
And his scent of sex and melancholy dipped in honeyed gin

I try to scrub squeaky clean the places he had been
Ignore the heady thrill of plunder each time I let him in
Block the sound of bodies fused together, yang meeting yin
The sense of being lost inside the games I’d win

I tear away at the past that I will always miss
The seduction of memory is wrapped in every kiss
A touch of heaven while drowning in bliss

And always the secret fear
That all I’ll ever know
Is this


Behind the veils I use to hide my head
Once a moonlit god lay upon my bed
One I swore to follow no matter where he led
A dangerous angel that played where demons bled.

Will there be a day when I forget your face
Where time and destiny will finally erase it
And your lips, your hands become
Merely a memory of grace?

Will there be a day when I discover that your face
Was a dream I that had dreamt?
That this dream of you, forgotten in the morning,
Was false, my recollection purified
By the light of dawning?

That I had forged you in my loneliness of flesh
To guard against an emptiness
A fortress for my sorrow
A feeling that I will not feel tomorrow?


That I will wake to see…

Could it be?

That you were never real, ephemeral as the air,
A fantasy birthed of youthful zeal
Neither here nor there?


Oh but the feel of him here inside my skin
That thrumming melody of earnest sins
The sweet surprise of that crooked grin
Those endless nights drunk on honeyed gin

What of the tingling in the places he had been
That game of him he’d always let me win
And the lovely stretching as he would slide in
The cycle of yang always meeting yin?


Lie.  Tell me that I will never forget the past
That those good times were meant to last

Tell me it will always be like the first kiss
That this is not all there is to life –
The times I’ll always miss.

Don’t tell me that it will end like this
That time will pass us by
And all I’ll ever know of you
Despite a whisper and a sigh

– is this.