My Last Inspiration

Why do your eyes haunt me still?
Why does your name linger on my tongue,
a sweetness from summer gone bitter by winter.
I thought it was done.
I thought you were gone.
After all it was so long ago,
when I saw you turn your back and walk off into darkness.
Not just the darkness of that night,
but the darkness I fell into without you by my side.

Why do I still think of you?
My greatest pain,
my last inspiration.
It seems I can’t be brought to fill these pages with the beautiful optimism I once did,
only with the depression from the sense of loss I feel for you.
I burn in thinking of you and sting without you.
I lose sense of self in mourning one who forgot me long ago.
No matter how far I run away,
I trip, I stumble, I fall, forced to crawl.
No matter the loves that come and pass
I rage, I forgive, I relapse, once again collapse.
Collapse into pieces less significant than the dirt at your feet.
Then after time build up those pieces into a semblance of the person I once was,
a facade to hide behind and fool the ones around me.
It’s a mockery.
Self treachery.
I betray myself with every heartbeat.
For my heartbeats are your footfalls.
They grow quieter.
They grow more distant,
and when they cease I give in.

I went back there again last night.
By accident, or so I thought at first.
I didn’t realize till I was there.
The place we shared.
At first I didn’t see, but then it all came back,
in one swift blur.
Headlight blinded, to grief bound silence.
Near to breaking, porcelain-fragile on the ground.
That place did what I could not do in all my nights of self-pity and regret:
It brought you back.
Brought you back to break it all again.
Not my heart like in some tinseltown drama,
but my spirit.
My self-esteem.
That self-doubting part inside me with which I had made peace.
The little piece in all of us we struggle so hard to cope with.
The part of me that loved the rest of me.
But no more.
How easy it was to forget how to love myself.
Imperfections grew stark against my self image.
The blood on the photograph.
The one I set ablaze to watch my own face melt away.

And so here I will sit, as the words flow from my hand.
Not in the slow and thoughtful way of my former poet self,
but dripping crimson from my fingertips.
It’s the only way I know how any more.
The beauty wrought from inner pain.
A thorn more potent than the rose.