You Still Haunt Me

you still haunt me, on summer nights like this, when the tender evening is endless and stretches out with promise, swollen, ripe and full.

i see your eyes blazing, but beneath the sparks, nothing only burnt red, that molten red for a moment then the void of purgatory, just burnt slag metal.

the humid park heavy with lilacs and promise still holds you for me,

,you are doomed to linger in the twilight, neither gone or present for as long as i walk, until i rest you will have no rest.

you carried no answers, you didn't even ask,
nights like this my eyes stinging, my body wan and thin and aching from twists and turns and losses,

but the heat and nether light draws you from me. i feel you pull out of my lungs,
and i fight for breath and breathe you in.

how like you to be smoke and twilight and sorrow.

how you would laugh at me, knowing that my flesh understood the thick stagnant absence of you.

for these short agonizing years, truncated by jail, and jobs and amnesia and just plain exclusion, but

the braids of our lives didn't blend and stitch to make a fabric.
we were only smoke and liquid,

after the sunrise we were only ache and sour knowledge, and the throb of knowing that we have lost something.

none of my words captured the twists and braid of our moments,
only now, i conjure you, doom you to appear and reappear again and again, as i ache the same wounds, as i bleed the old scars,

and still you only look at me with those Byronic eyes, dark and smoldering, that somehow in your haze and confusion, won you warm bodies that would swim the darkness for you.

they were nothing, only moments, flakes of your life, divergences from the ache,
the throb that never left.

that was all you had, eyes and ache, and sour knowing that you were empty, and only waiting .

you spent our summer in the lilac park, smoldering, smoking trying to build to a flame, longing to flair and scorch the night.

summers and endless twilight carried us apart, we never were together, you were lost from the first moment, you and i both knew,

we knew it was a matter of where and when, i held on through most of it, but time, or the world or fate moved us on, both understanding that we knew,

and my vision was able to see beyond the flash,

and on nights like this, that are endless and stretch out beyond the curve of possibility, when the stars shower the night,

i conjure you, doom you to repeat again and again, these hot humid nights we spent lost between twilight and sunrise, and i still try to find the answers in those burning Byronic eyes,

in despair i ask the same questions, longing beyond flesh and breath to understand, but only find the shine of the moon in your mouth and the silence hiding behind the soft drone of crickets,

and in the roll of time and my life, the sorrow lingers, and i have condemned you to have no rest until i find my peace.