Calcify

my curse has always been
to romanticise my life
when it didn’t deserve it

that time we kissed in the rain
I was an fleabite on your arm
that you scratched when I turned away

the Polaroid of us drinking
mulled wine in a cabin
I looked at for a swollen moment
then threw out with the rest of it

running shoeless through a rainstorm
in September when all you wanted
was to be an hour and a half away
with another’s silver on your hand
and your foot on the neck
of someone who could give
themselves away to you

lying to the right of you
when the man on your left wanted
a bite of your heart and none
of mine while you scythed
down to reach him
and cut me like corn

a night where I squinted
through glass and alcohol
at a glittering stage and thought
myself alike until a stranger
with mischief in his mouth
called you the beauty
and me, fool’s gold
on a riverbed, the rock-bottom
of life I never thanked you for
although it was the last good
you gave in our Walpurgis night

when we dined I trusted a glamour
while you watched my plate
and yearned for drinks
we never called to our table
I shared you to the world
when I wanted them to know
my softness, but it was
the bruise of a fruit turned
by the heat of carousing
headlong into Titania’s
house when I should
have opened my eyes

but we still gleam like crescents
in the dark of one another
still think of the time a train
bolted me to your ankle
or the night we rolled
in music and light at some
function where I didn’t fit in
but was happy, somehow

it’s the fact I think we saw it,
all of us, you, and you, and you
that my edges were rough
and I had a wonderland’s sum
of tears to wade through
on a grasshopper’s feast
that I’d attrite myself
to the point that I
was as edible as chalk
to be rubbed out
when I could be pushed
no further and began
to calcify all over again