Your name is a colour
I see the world in these days,
A tinted lens which deceives the eye,
Fills street corners with the shade of you.
As though through tracing paper,
I etch your features onto faces
Of strangers I’ll never know;
Now that’s what you’ve become.
Conversations echo, distorted by
Memory’s sleight of hand,
And recycled phrases I regurgitate,
Half-made up in the space of silence,
Until all meaning has leached away.
I’d still marvel at your poetry
Dissect each phrase, until it collapses
Into letters of unravelling form.
Are words just words?
Or is there something caught
In the snare of subtext
That would explain it all?
Fill in the gaps left by things unsaid
To form a dot-to-dot picture
Consisting only of negative space,
Shaped like the distance between us?
You
Me
I know now not to analyse nothingness,
Now I know that’s what I’ve done all along.
So I’ve stopped conjuring your name onto
The pixelated screen of disappointment
Watched a firework fade into a piece
Of sky in the jigsaw of the world,
My eyes tracing the pattern,
Though I know I’ll soon
forget.
