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.
Where you weave portraits of
Fragile men drowning in Madonna’s eyes,

Men who do not come with expiration dates

And men who overdosed in front of you.
Your portrait is a monochrome memoir

Why it didn’t rhyme when

You said you would leave
And why, after you,

I will run out of topics to write about.
In a fixated corner, you are still holding me

In-between your palms like a wilted flower.
In a post-war July, you leave,
And I have been struggling to write ever since.