The days now are brief.

Strange how they seem to lack now in hours, despite the usual twenty-four.

We slip so easily beneath the heavy quilt of winter,

Seeking in the darkness some warmth, a refuge or shelter –

We look in all the wrong places.

You’ll never find it there..

When you wake at day’s first light

the sky mausoleum grey -

tight fisted, white-knuckled – Jesus, it packs a punch.

So what is lacking now, darling?

As the earth tilted on its axis –

draped us in its dark silks of shadow

you already had me off kilter,

spinning fast away from the soft balm of that Indian summer –

those days honeyed, golden, hyssop sweet – your hand once, now gone.

You watched coolly like some innocent bystander

while before you I fell - slow-motion - I slapped hard to the concrete –

 - grey, gravity, dark.

You had to know it would hurt.

It was easier not to think about it.

Hey, what could you say…

Nothing much, anyway.

You had taken what you wanted – needed.

Your necessary validation.

Yes, you could ‘still have.’

You had proven yourself desirable, and me?

A device, some crutch;

Tell me, did I help you get through some mid-life crisis?

And what of my own confusion of the heart?

Did you think it was all some two-step tango? A game?

A coy double-entendre – hey, maybe I’d yield.

Or maybe that was just too scary.

Even I didn’t know. For you, it was all just to prove, just to see anyway.

Hey…

There’s no Virtue here. No Black nor White.

No Society for the Prevention of Vice.

How hard would it have been to reassure? Really…

How hard to just once tell me when the deal went down?

You couldn’t offer the one necessary kiss –

one simple validation, that’s all.

Our secrets already kept. Understood.

It would have made all the difference.

You backed away, you took and you took.

Not once did you offer just that one obvious thing –

It hung between us – a mobile of gentle bees –

as we sat in a perfect Eden , secret and sharing,

never once did I question the innocence of this –

But after – when a sudden shock of guilt -

– you took me and my virtue –

conveniently painted me your Jezebel –

some wicked temptress, you got what you wanted

Kept that kiss -  you tucked it safely away in a drawer –

beside the letters, the book, the other precious gifts …

You kept, you keep this to yourself.

It is all I ever wanted. All I ever needed to just to know.

You never had to say a word: that one kiss would say it all.

A dialect of two. But no… It wouldn’t do.

You left me cold to fend for myself – crying in some anonymous taxi,

looking as the everything blurred,none of it made sense,

and in that moment I felt the glass cathedral of my heart shatter,

the shards cutting at the arteries.

How the blood pumps and pumps.

You helped!

see...you prove I am alive.

That my blood is real –

I bleed the same color as you,

that when I hurt – it seizes to the core – I feel the pain, do you?

I guard my secrets carefully.

You keep the solution locked away in a drawer -

along with the other things exchanged, safe breathing secrets.

Me? I am without the solution.

I can't access you anymore.

So you hold on to the tincture -

my sacred, scared, sacrosant kiss,

why do you keep it?

is it there at all?

Maybe: just in case.

I give you the variables.

So carefully you keep gaurd of the solution.