Kraken

The great gray bulk of your grief and the tear

you’ve lost at sea-

you’ve lost your sheen, minerals leached. Huge eye brimming

close to me,

you think you know what you are.

Fuck, maybe I am wrong

about what you are. Lord knows,

Lord only knows I’ve been wrong about you

before.

Monster drag my ship down to the end: at the root of the last drop of the needle at the bottom of the whole world,

nothing left in either of our gray bodies. There is no more gold to mine

from your summer skin my love you are dying right in front of me. I sleep in the sea

of the bed that was ours,

my heart reaching, breathless,

for the old shine of your mortal form.

There’s been worse in this life.

But right now, at this second,

it seems to me that I have never known violence like the sharp twist of your head away from me, sharp line of the syringe in the bottom of the trash can,

perfectly quiet, just an object,

when I know goddamn well I’ve sworn up and down

that I wouldn’t get to the point that I’m dumping out the fucking trash can.

I can inhale still but it’s not oxygen,

not quite.

In this room

there is only your silence, rejecting

my feeble but persistent attempts to love you

despite and because and through. I know

we danced together in this room, once, when you could still laugh and your expensive dust hadn’t come, yet,

to coat you gray and mute. I know

you believe deep in your fearful, sad bones that you are not beautiful or worthy but

I have promised again and again to love you, beautiful worthy you,

every bone every dance.

(for the hundredth time my love your poisonous gray dust sings to you louder than the tears in my voice and it’s faster than me I can never catch up no matter how much gold ekes back into me, summer by summer beach by beach love by love.)

The kraken is from an art show drawn by a beautiful girl and everyone is looking at the girl but I am looking at the kraken because it’s you and I always find you in a room. You call me, from far away and long ago, because you always know when I am about to reach out or draw closed and you say:

come with me to a beach somewhere I don’t care where. Let's leave tonight.

But you are already out to sea and I’m staring into the kraken’s eyes having never seen pain like his. His is not the only pain but he doesn’t know that, in fact has never known that, just like he doesn’t know there are more paths than Monster. God, I wish you cried more. This tear – mine – is our lost baby is our imminent death is our combined pain worn all the way to its logical end and I know you are full of regret for your own cowardice, selfishness, but I can’t see, I’m crying now too in the middle of the art show with all these expensive goddamn people.

I bring you here, to my apartment in the city, the last safe place. We fuck each other like we are starving, like fucking was a necessity in the same way you’d need a blood transfusion after a car accident. Later, I ask if you ever pretended someone else was me. You seem so surprised by the question. “No,” you finally say, and I see you swallow, the sun sliding over your new haircut, your golden skin, a trick of your old light. “You’re you. There is no one like you.”

You are dying right in front of me.

You are vanishing before my eyes.

You are changing into something impossible to trust, tentacled and cold.

Your shoulderblades jutting further out to the sea of the bed that was ours

where I used to hold you early in the golden skin of morning

and you’d pretend to sleep still and curl closer to my heartbeat.

And now:

your hair knotting black-gray thin, your knuckles sharp,

your pirate eyes clouding

at the edge of the cliff.