In a desperate attempt
To get you to listen,
I whisper your name in
Three distinctive pitches.
Instead, you choose to reply in
The passive voice and wrongly put full stops.
So, I keep asking why a body
Reeking of forgotten poems
Will never be a proper metaphor for love.
You do not ask why,
So I do not tell.
Instead, in a different metaphor
on someone else’s skin,
Two young lovers dance slowly,
To Skinny Love.
Over a battlefield with
Scattered polaroids and flowers.
Look by now
I have spent all my money,
On sending angry voice recordings
Of "Letters to Milena"
To someone now dead.
And have crumbled to past traumas
So many times now that there
Are not any more places left
In my body to injure.
Everyone I know by now has grown tired
Of me stuffing my mouth with April's
Reeking of insomnia and self-pity.
Instead, when you complain about why
I do not produce pretty poems about violinists who wear
Orange too much and cover Iron & Wine
And are sentimental.
Your lover spends the majority of his afternoons
Thinking of cemeteries,
And how you said
Thinking about people through scotch bottles
Will turn their memories purple.
Your lover, now a bartender, serves disfigured
Glen Fiddich bottles and believes intangible
Things like feelings still grow on trees;
And often asks irrelevant questions like
"How does one love a woman like you,
Or why things that are yellow in colour don't come
With caution labels of “unhinged hopes”".