letting go of you

           something way over our heads

           happened years ago                                             physically &

           when I met you                                                                metaphysically

           a pubescent morning sky
           opened out onto                  

           early Autumn sidewalk cafes 

           on the outskirt of the city I
           failed noticing the
           withering auburn pine
           spreading
           solemn evening ashes
           supinely among
           a day shortening skyline
           outside our apartment window
           cars motored past in grim procession
           while loving 

           drugs and not

           you fore

           God had a plan

           it was all
           gonna come back
           automatic and 

           haunt me one day
           alone
           as darkening shadows played
           their way through
           our nightly bedroom curtains
           your grey apparition 

           danced round the foot of my bed

           at the evil stroke
           of vulnerable midnight

           perhaps it was not you who died

           but I 

           and this routine purgatory knew no rest

           nor end
           'til now

           I'd like to meet you at a local bar one afternoon

           or maybe a village train station

           trivially make eyes on an evening turnstile

           one rainy weekday in June
           when

           things  finally change
           and

           I terminally let go of you

           driving your spectral vision 

           six feet deep
           into
           the muddled soil

           

           

church bells

                               
                   church bells resonated
                   one deadening evening
                   behind rural county curtains
                   piercing poignantly through
                   our late Sunday silence
                   another summer weekend climaxed 
                   toward juvenile autumn
                   its provincial fires 
                  slowly igniting up an
                  assorted pastel conflagration of
                  maple and pine
                  past their prime
                  gradually ambling up
                  our township skyline

                  replaying father's latent words
                  tween my mind's tired auditorium
                 "remember son,
                  she will destroy you"
                 
                  I made love to your sallow core
                  fore the mild autumn, cold in its war
                  prior to being borne
                  fore the fall of man, nor
                  calling you whore
             
                  I made my way over to your apartment
                  whilst you were alive
                  I did things, write
                  we'd fuck
                   and fight
                      
                  between hollow weekday nights
                  and
                  mother's bourgeoisie magazines
                  stacked sordidly
                  upon residential restroom porcelain
                  perpetual moonbeams
                  found their way
                  through
                  family room windows
                  months before my eyes bled onto
                  your white, sable and grey
                  newspaper obituary inkling
             
                  church bells pealed
                  behind the unwinding sidewalk
                  neighborhood cathedral
                  your body hanged in stale solidity before me
                  dead in the placid air
                  I
                  a dank shark caught in the quaint abyss of expired life
                 you
                 as a good
                 book put down
                 in haste
                 shouldn't have ended