Her Loving A Phantom

Ocher and chrome and the last dying breath in her lungs,

There, in the neons, 

Resting behind her eyelids, the scent of him napalm,

The nuclear winter called love,

She thumbs her way through his silences,

Cigarette flickering, halted. 

There is blood in the water, blood on the glossed laminate,

And eight hundred frames of a three-year movie

Trapped inside her like the festering hand of some derelict creature,

Crawling its' way from the grave. 

In her, it starts with the keen aches,

Of knowing and having been known - 

That low ache, that sweet execution; 

That tender touch of the guillotine blade

Coming down over her bony shoulders,

Just the same as when they were young, and the sight of him there

Was a bane. 

Low, into nothing - the darkness, as oil and leaving - she burns them; 

Until, like him, they are done with. 

In dreaming, subterfuge, elusive like hell and the slow blaze,

Means everything to her, again. 

There will no longer be any being a girl, 

As she was with the kohl smudged under her lashes - 

Something pretty for him, something cruel

In the swaying of unloved bodies

To tuneless sounds thrown at the void

In a smoky back room with no name, 

And no hold over her as he'd had,

Primeval chains marked in binding. 

Her writhing heart lost to the agonized thought

That perhaps, after all, it was more than misguided

And youthful revenge - 

Her loving a phantom, a ghost;

Yet, in her, 

Still alive.