I’ve been looking through old journals lately and found the first draft of the poem below. I thought I’d posted it before, but it seems I didn’t.

Regret

I lie to my atoms,
telling every electron
that you’re still close,
not a million stars away.
Fooling my system is easy,

but I’m still hungry for your pain,
the sky of confusion in your eyes,
the quiet hurt on your tongue.

If you slept with me again,
you’d find my angles and lines
are knives ready for cutting,
my first blood ballet.

But you’re kind: you’d never
sell me to the Traveling People
who would replace my fluids
with bitter paste so I would never
understand water again.

Come back to me,
my mysterious cloud.
Let us eat blackness together.