Forget-Me-Not

 Lulling in slumber with plangent chants of a cynic’s lyric. She taunts me through the gloom.

Stagnant and shadowed by an ashen Sycamore, she sways. Pallid hair pillowing softly, peripheral to her halo and southern to her throat, cut blunt at her crowning rib. Ivory skin spun from silks, stolen away from corrupted Kings in the pocket of a beggar man. Frosted lashes border a laurel doe-eye, a single tear crystallised on the western cheekbone, a diseased smile embedding a deathly plague beneath a philitrum’s plunging basin in which I float.

*

I was not sixteen when I first encountered this love. It’s not an uncommon tale; boy meets girl, they fall into the bottomless depths of desire for one another, marriage...I’m assured the reader knows the score. But before the writer reveals all that has become of a lovesick mind, know this: this is not a love story. It bears much closer to tragedy... For she was sad and tired, my first - no - only love, and I was young and naive... moronic really, willing to throw my life away for my beloved – again not uncommon, but listen close. I remember the days of my sanity more clearly than ever, in the irony that the further one falls into a frenzied dementia, the more apparent it becomes to accurately reassemble an exact replica photograph of your old self – a phantom in natural colours. His footsteps thud thud thud, traipsing aimlessly from room to room, wrenching in vain at the bars that slice the space between window and cell. I need to repossess her you see, rebuild her brick by brick, I’d made her this way she’d sob, I’d done this to us she’d scream. She left but only with Autumn’s terminal leaf who slammed stark at my heels, welding amber veins into leaden gravel, leading nowhere.  

I map out her each and every motion; she can’t escape me no more you see...she thinks she got ahead but no. She’s too predictable; I remember every clamour, flat lexis with sharp edges, too predictable, too easy to catch. Her side of the wardrobe’s still full; once candied now cremated perfume still perched on porcelain’s bitter basin beneath the mirror I’d spent my Saturday afternoon fixing up for her two Springs ago – cracks are still visible from uncountable feuds – I’d lost my temper is all – my knuckles bear testimony, irrevocable indentations that spawn an evil twin, distorting his face with divorced features for every morning with the twenty ticks it takes for him to remember that she’s not downstairs. Not clicking on the kettle and flick flick flicking through static, until her bruised thumb falls limp over outstanding electric bills that won’t pay themselves you know. She may have fled. Melted away within stygian ink, flitting through sharp sliced moonlight shot south in glinting ribbons by Argent Sickle’s bow. She may have fled. 

But she’ll come back.  

*

A nightmare in wide eyes – roused without witness. Catch catch catch. Run love run. Forget-me-nots sprouting azure from wherever her sole was so likely to press, only to die  lamentable deaths as their faces twist upwards to meet the Sun’s claret glare. For this is the kind of sun that sits in a bloodied horizon. The kind of sun that – at midday – emits chrome rays who waltz in shimmer, granting your eye with an image of Elysium, with Angels to stand guard in your Grass Kingdom…Only to betray you at the bribe of silver to Dusk’s acrimonious claw. A Dusk that hunts with these Angels as Ghosts – wings severed at their feet by a Tempest’s biting blade – that screech through silence and wish you dead. 

They got their wish.