True Colors
My old lover is painting me with deadpan eyes. She told me that I was a figure now; not the man whose cheap trick made the crevices in her thighs sweat and that my touch was her heart’s contraband. I woke to bodiless beds and ate breakfast alone when the end was near. In the night she peeled my strict embrace off like onion layers and fled me to see herself blanched white reverberating in street black night. Next door, we hear her flatmate fucking, though they complained earlier about the sweet swoon music we made and the way it would meander under his door in the wee hours slinking across the floorboard and into his lonely living quarters. I can only smirk for the clarity of those memories, how close I am in my mind’s eye to seeing her clearly again as she sees me now; on this grim stool, grey and goose-bumped from the cold winter we were so careful to keep each other from. Her kitten quietly pawed the crushed cigarette butts built up in the flower pot on the window sill like bodies in world war trenches. Our insignificant sacrifice, the abortion of breaths, magnum tombstone wrapped in gold, climax eulogy groaned, nicotine sacrament. Now this bed that I was a stranger to, and then knew all too well, became subdued in, and then outgrew feels once again foreign, flagged by another fleet with scents unfamiliar. My ex-lover is painting me with deadpan eyes, lips sealed making the kind of portrait it took all these years loving me and learning to love herself more to have the autonomy to depict in a light only antique flames could reveal.