Requiem

I want to taste the skin
on your neck as
and disappear in your arms one more time

The best I have, though,
is a midnight breeze on the beach
where we shared those stolen sunsets,
pinkies linked
eyes for nothing but the
we,
the us
the giant culmination of
ours
that dwarfed the world
when our lips touched.

My hair is a shroud whipping
against the urn in my arms as
the salt air slaps the
tear-stripes on my cheeks.

As solemn as a service
in the denomination of us
I said the things I couldn’t.
Felt the things I shouldn’t.
And shook your remains free
to dance with me once more in the wind.

I watched with wet eyes
and a dry throat
as you swirled into the sky
like a murder of crows
skimming a grave.

But romantic shit always
goes up my ass sideways,
because the wind gusted
 
One of those big fucking gusts,
nearly threw my skirt over my head,

and your ashes blew back.

Five pounds of your charred remains,
bits of bone and charcoal shrapnel
cut against me
casting a paint-spatter silhouette
against the sky,
coating me in the finality of you.
Of the end of you.

I choke on a scream,
or maybe a laugh,
the whites of my eyes bleeding as
chips of you scratch at the cornea,
fragments of you stick to the tears
as if I were getting ashes
at a church where I don’t pray.

But I do pray here.
I pray this macabre sacrament,
I pray in earnest at the altar
where you worshiped my body
and I committed blasphemy
with every benediction.

I pray here.
In the sand.
As I inhale you,
tears and snot and spittle
dripping from my haggard face,
I pray as I cough
until I dry heave

while your ashes cement into my lungs,
cement so thick the
coroner’s scalpel clinks
against concrete
on the day of my autopsy,
and he wonders
how the actual fuck
I survived Pompeii

(We all know I didn’t really survive.)

I gasp for less breath.
Less breath.
Less breath
as sand creates pebbles
in my forehead and
I writhe against the ground,
knees under me,
and try to remember
how to inhale,
how to open my eyes,
how to stand

with nothing remaining
but you-scarred charnel
puckering my skin

I gasp for less breath
and exhale slowly,
comforted by the justice
that I’ll never be
without you.

Each pained breath is you
and I sink into the hurt like a shroud.

And when rasps
from my chest turn into rattles,
I get life-flash-flip-books
of the way we
that night,
that time,
your hands,
my legs
my god ...


And when I inhale with
less breath
I say amen now.

When my eyes scratch
and blinking hurts
I say amen.

When I miss the way
the skin on your neck tastes,
and the way I disappeared into your arms...

Amen.