photo: Katherine Du Tiel
So innocuous, this place
with horizons for walls,
this featureless room
where our distillations meet.
The air here reeks of
the last word you wrote.
With time, with silence
the scent turns to
rancid semiotic soup.
The specter of every phrase
goes brittle at the edges.
I cut myself on them
to make sure they
were ever said.
I will never touch you.
I will never taste your skin.
Tell myself it’s better that way,
and fool myself that
I’ve kept you safe from me.
When you leave,
turning out the light,
in the black room
it becomes,
I eat you whole.
I choke on
your ghost,
love.
RG, that is beautiful. I have tears in my eyes.
Wow, thank you Penny. I certainly didn’t mean to make you cry.
I felt it. It was ouchy. I enjoyed it.
I am ashamed to have read so little of your work. This is stunning.
“I cut myself on them
to make sure they
were ever said.”
Wow!
Dan
Many thanks for the compliment, Dan. Most of my work is not all that stunning. Most of it is just plain flithy.
Rgrl, this is so rich with brain and heart and skill–you have my mind working and my throat getting tight. Beautiful. (“Rancid semiotic soup” is a stunning image.)
I’m glad you had a physiological reaction to it. That’s …wow. And incredible compliment.
I cried. I’m crying today anyway, but one more time doesn’t hurt. Well, it does actually, but that’s ok. I have a lot to flush out. And I’ve choked on a lot of ghosts. A beautiful, desperate image. Thank you, RG.
Wow.
I’ve been quietly reading through your work, having discovered it by accident, and loving it.
This poem spoke to me so directly – I feel suckerpunched.
I met an amazing man online, through our shared love of the written word, and we’ve been having a relationship fuelled by words out of necessity as we live on opposite sides of the world – we write stories, letters, talk often on the phone… but the absence of physical contact gnaws at us both, and I sometimes wonder if it will ever be different.
“Tell myself it’s better that way,
and fool myself that
I’ve kept you safe from me”…
I often read back through our letters and “cut myself on them”…
Thankyou for this. I feel less alone, somehow.
xx