Burn The Same

Monday, October 1st, 2018

I lost you to my madness.  I pushed your soft voice from my head, replacing it with a buzzing that was static noise, packed with coded information.  It dulled the world around me and pulled me from the thoughts which are kind, which allow for one person and another to exist, to be.  

There is a color behind my eyes that tints the regular day.  It is red.  It does not wash from the hands nor the clothes and both must be hidden or cut off and buried deep.  When it was not this mad season I found forgiveness in the first words I spoke in reply.  It was not grudge to sit and behold the folly of babel that fills most rooms.  But that time has fled, pushed over a suicide bridge.  The clock and calendar have synchronized, for there can be only one time when I lost you to my madness.

The day has washed itself of warmth and smells precisely as the night.  It brings only X-ray light to hollow out the brass cup of empathy and strangle the sweet hope of dreams.  It is torture to reach out in the night, across the vast desert of sheets and find no oasis.  To think back to that one night when you showed me the delights that grow under the palms. 

But I lost that too, didn't I?  I strangled it with my bare hands, beat it from the world.  Severed it and turned the basement into a side-show mausoleum.  Funny that solutions find themselves when the mind thinks it is dreaming.  

Solutions.  

Problems.  

They orbit one another.  They trade places.  They merge as action taken.  And what is done is done.  I think about how much I loved you.  I must have.  I could not destroy that with which I was dispassionate.  I could not steal the breath from lungs, silence the voice and still the heart.  I could not stare into vacant eyes and fill them with my own tears.  

But love was an infection to be cleansed.  A stain to be scrubbed clean from the hardwood floor, broken down into small, manageable pieces, fed bit by bit into that all-consuming blaze that is passion.  This as October sky dims with the hazy smoke of ten thousand chimneys. 

And they all burn the same.