a summer without you

July 2011


Time has been playing with me
(as you have been playing with me).
His mocking saunter from
sunset to sunset

drags

just to spite me.
Your absence is my
constant companion, but it
can't hold my hand like you used to.

The July weeks crawl with cruel languor;
a stagnant body of undisturbed joy,
pooling in my stomach after the sweltering heat
of missing you.

I am hungry for some small morsel of you-
some oasis of a letter
(just a sign
that you still think of me). But
you have not written
and my heart goes unstirred by some
silly scrawled story
and

the hours stumble onwards
with a careless, slurring lethargy
(like last month
when you were drunk and called to say sorry,
you couldn't love me).

But nothing makes sense without you, nothing;
all I can do is pray Time will pass quickly.
Wait- they all say it- but
I have been waiting.
I am so sick of the hoping, the praying.
I go through the motions, I count down the days, but

this summer is a wasteland of dead time
and your love for me seems a carcass.