Minefields Ahead

I want to write
of your gentle, sloping smile
but it’s not there again.

I want to tell of your
fingertips and your heartbeat
and of your turning, twisting words
to strangers on the
other side of the planet
but the truth is
I am lost.
None of these things
belong to me now.
They have fled like
children from the dark.

And now even the elements
I had longed to forget:
your holding hands,
your callous caress of his shoulder,
and the three words you whispered,
on the cusp of sleep
on a bus just outside of Mulranny, Co Mayo,
that I almost never knew,

I pull at the strands of them
as they unravel in my hands.
And there’s nothing there
to replace them,
save for intolerably intoxicated nights
and cringing, broken embraces
and the darkness.
The indefinable and indefinite darkness
that I dread.

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