I took down the photographs of you that stood on the Moroccan inlay accent table at my elbow. I replaced them with jewel-tone vases and miniature orchids, a tiny version of the ones in your greenhouse. Your scarf is gone too. I want to remember winters that are more like the ones you know, the ones that I always teased you about. More like Muncie and less like Muncey. I gave it to a homeless man who had long hair and a beard and looked not in the least like you but made my heart leap nonetheless.
Our room still overlooks the garden, the aged cedar fence that is barely visible under a drapery of green ivy in the summer but that right now, looks like a lace work of skeletons. It’s not unbeautiful in its way… Not without poetry, like the dead roses that are still roses and so shall be until I call them by another name and I call it “the guest room” now…
I used to know you by a certain name. A name with consonants and syllables that caressed my tongue and sent chimera shivers through my thoughts. If you write to me and tell me that you have disowned your name, you will never hear it from my lips again; but left here to my own subconscious devices, I find myself etching its letters among words of love and spilled ink thoughts. Don’t flatter yourself. This is not a love poem.
These are just words that fall as effortlessly onto the page in front of me as they always did. If you asked any of the old gang, they’d tell you that most days I look right as rain but they don’t know that inside I’m a fucking hurricane and that sometimes I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams; threadbare and fraying and I could really use a friend because talking to myself is becoming a thing. Not to mention a run on sentence. I hate admitting that though I haven’t done in a very long while, I sometimes ache for the tiniest news of you – even if it’s bad and that seeing the home exterior paint chip colours makes me sad. The house we built together with bullshit and dreams and too much Budweiser and Strongbow… Not knowing that time is too damn short and that hurt does evaporate just like this snow that hasn’t stopped falling in two days but tastes as heavenly on my tongue as your mouth.
Come home nameless one.
Come home to me. I have never felt so alone, so utterly lost in this world. I’m not mad anymore. That’s more bullshit. I’m furious when I think about it too long. Come home, bring a pizza, bring those size twelve boots all covered in snow and wear them into the house. I don’t care…
I want to be your best friend again.
~ kei
3 February 2015
©Karin Bole Tupper
Poet's Corner 