They Come Back

It's not that I don't appreciate the messages, calls, texts, chats.
I'm sure what lies in them is more than the obvious:
your loneliness, coupled with a renewed heat
for what I had given so freely
a year ago, or more.
Your own heartbreak, seeking out
the shared pain
the anguish
the camaraderie of my own broken soul.

I'm sure, buried deep in the invitations
the checking ins
the positive affirmations for each new day,
there is an aim towards genuine friendship,
a desire to shoulder this long season ahead with
warmth
of bourbon and wine
fire
the poetry we effortlessly coo to one another
as if we were, ourselves, the love letters between such greats
as Kahlil and Mary, who lived their entire lives
wrapped in the blanket of language, love lost
forever
from them both.

Your efforts are not unnoticed, my dear.
The lines you cast into my crashing waves
return to you empty,
without the meat and meal you hunger for most.
I see the hook and bait you choose
ever so carefully, cautiously...
but even the most delectable temptations
are wasted
on a woman who will not feed.

It is not your fault, tender lover,
when rage boils over in my heart
liquid fire in every organ
bearing the banner which reads
"They always come back."
It is only a preoccupation in my mind.
The anger, the reeling that
for as easy as it was to cast me once into the turbulent seas,
always, and each time, they all come back to me.


They come back, pecking vultures,
dope fiends needing a fix of
my sex, my gracious heart,
to wear me on their arm
or chain me to the bed until
(as it always has gone, and, what reason
is left for me to believe it would ever be otherwise?)
they find, once again, someone
some thing
that mystical element which I seem not to possess
not for anyone,
but that will always entreat and entice them
away again,
as I lay bound in shackles
sinking to the ocean floor.

I know you mean not to watch me drown.
I know, at this time, in your heart
you are most certain and determined to
carry me from the water, to
place me on the gentle earth, to
breathe what life has been lost to me
back into my lungs, to
see me open my eyes, unveiled with skepticism and defeat,
that I might "see" you. That I might smile at the sight.

This is what they always want when they come back.

For you, o bereft pirate,
I say this:
your ship came and went.
You know this already.
In my current fury, I would warn you
not to be drawn to this siren's song...
you know the myth, and may end up, yourself
at the bottom of the sea...

but rest quietly at your prow,
and gently stroke the black waters of my heart's discontent
with no hope or expectation.
You may linger there, and
hum along to my sad love songs, and
peer into the shallows beneath the water's surface, and
maybe
just maybe
at the very least...

I might one day smile.