WHAT YOU DID IN REVERSE

You arrive in my body in slow motion
Not a sudden sun or a flash flood
but sepsis – oil spills – slow and thick
People talk of traumas, but those are quick
lightning strikes
Scalped lives
Minds made sick by poisoned blood

Yet you have a slow path; a bad start
Felled trees, dried creeks, bones bleached
by this morning’s first frightful light
Insidious and viscous stale piss into
exit wounds
backwards
Dragged in reverse to the beating heart

Deeper in and now I know I should have known
that this is how it would have gone
The signs were clear: days stripped bone-bare
as Poseidon’s glass. And once we were both there
with stones on
our skin
and the middle water’s dust in your hair

We simply swam. Those shining days at sea
: the moths, the light, the ocean gardens
Shells, fish, skulls; ships to great hallowed
sleeping islands who watched our shallow
naked dives
in salt
I wish you never left

Those constant shores are never changed
by spinning years and turning suns
We took the hems of stone and static
waves in strides. No more than sand before their
mirrored ebbs
and flows
These tides do not obey the moon

And closer to my core you drift away
Threadbare trail is thin through thick whorl
Your arms exposed to thorns are brushing
through unhurt as I’m just cut, stuck, crushing
underfoot
forlorn
wild young who howl and never stand a hope

There’s nowhere safe to really step. Too late
I learned to dance. The song’s words
foreign wildfires bright enough to blind me
Hands that leave me spinning. Nothing left
behind me
but night
I wish we never met