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”".

Your lover is not 21 anymore,

Still drinks his whiskey mixed with withdrawal,

And recalls your memories through shades of purple;

Mauve, for how you smelled,

Electric violet, for your

Love of Led Zeppelin.

Your lover, now almost 25,

Still returns home

To unmade beds and absent lovers;

​
And on Sundays, they dig holes

To bury self-deprecating

Self-love that’s two weeks stale.

At 27, your lover will contemplate

How he always

Had Stockholm syndrome
Lying next to you.

​

At 40, he will become colour-blind

And will not remember how it felt to be with you.

Instead, at 42, your lover will write you

A poem where you could be 18

And a ventriloquist somewhere
in Amsterdam,

How your shows will not come with

Warning labels of how you cannot
“scream, cry or leave”.

Instead, your shows would come with trigger warnings

For intimacy and of men being
Delicate, and how one of them saran-wrapped you

To a mailbox somewhere in Rome and
Never returned.

Your shows will be based on a series of

Monochromatic flashbacks 

Where all the protagonists
Are suffering from Helsinki syndrome

And how the world keeps collapsing due to

Young girls dying of
Angst and loneliness.

Your lover, now 58 and three suicide attempts later,

Can no longer remember how your skin
Felt, and neither can he

Trace this poem back to you.

Instead, your lover collapses every time
He thinks of you. In a post-war August,

Your lover at 62 or 19 will overdose on

Heroin and
Drown to death.