61 Heartbreak poems

When you said no, I went for your dresser, opened the top drawer, broke the paper seals on the two sterile cups, and wiped my dirty thumbs inside. Because our stubborn love won’t die, I have to kill it, will it dead. Or so I thought until I passed a cycle on my own. You’ve no idea what’s grown inside me since I bled.

I wear my heart on my sleeve, or rather both sleeves, since it's usually broken. Sometimes when I join my hands to pray, the jagged edges briefly touch, like a plate that fell and cracked apart from being asked to hold too much.

I said no to you so often, couldn't see. Do you know how that changed you —divided what you saw in me or anything (if you did) from what you said or mostly didn't? And another bottle drained, your head lolling off the chair's back, the mirror's face blacked.

Give, give me back that Trifle you despise, Give back my Heart, with all its Injuries: Tho’ by your Cruelty it wounded be, The Thing is yet of wond’rous Use to me. A gen’rous Conqueror, when the Battle’s won, Bestows a Charity on the Undone: If from the well aim’d Stroke no Hope appear, He kills the Wretch, and shews Compassion there: But you, Barbarian! keep alive Pain, A lasting Trophy of Unjust Disdain.

Yesterday, everything was possible. Today we’re good as married. You don’t want to hear that, do you, thinking I’m going to call you back in from the rain to fight over the morning paper, limning my deft and emotional promiscuities? That we’ll sit in our sitting room, watching the shaggy junipers twirl in winter wind as a storm closes its throat around the city? I’m thinking about how to ask God to be nicer. I’m thinking about that fabled leper colony where the last, solitary patient waited inside its unlocked tower three years in the belief she could not step outside. And how the local doctors visited only to re-wrap her face, to brush out her last gold strands of hair, wondering how to save anybody so willing to kill herself with denial. They wanted to talk about pain, the doctors, to say, One day, you’ll be half asleep in the dark, listening to a radio play in another room, and feel yourself suddenly filling like a jug with the cold awareness nothing more will ever happen, the disaster of your old ambivalence, the familiarity of desire’s wolfish teeth sinking into the body. The body, as if it didn’t belong to you anymore. The doctors said, Fear should never be elevated to ritual. They told the woman, You must change your life! One day, I’m on the steps of an office tower losing a shoe, the next I’m screaming on a gurney, I’m stuffing a baby into a diaper. I’m wondering the woods in my scar-dark cape. Every story has an archetype, doesn’t it? And if so, why aren’t we married? Why can’t we be just like everyone else this fucking, fucking once? God, I hate the way this tale is turning out: two aged strangers learning to tuck in their blood, hiding the knives and bread crumbs deep inside their pockets. Look, this time I swear, I won’t run; really; I’ll come and go from my stone room without a mirror, all my extremities taped in white. I’ll learn to knit with three fingers. I’ll learn to read into the deepening silences, to be nice to your step-sisters, singing to drown out the tears of their ugliness. I love you. Can I even say that? In this story, I want to spend the rest of my life growing quietly bored with you, locking away loom and spindle, sweeping out the piles of rose petals and ash. For once, I plan to triumph over smug experience. I marry you. Don’t hit me. Please, just come in from the stars awhile, sit here in this sitting room, let me find you another section of the paper to argue over. The doctors said I get to wear a suit. They said I’ll be released next Thursday. Listen: even now, the junipers are whispering their dark good-byes, thin limbs smocked in white. A riderless horse has appeared on the horizon. And somewhere, out in the meretricious night, somebody’s life is quietly changing.

When my lover became my enemy I made my bed amongst winds and drove the old road ’till my heart crashed. Where’s the bypass? Washing my shirts, wringing them out. Hung in the breeze. Water skips undressed over outcrops. What it says is. Wind, roots in rock. Lying on Long Tongue, sun diffused in mist. Easy sleep without waking. Edge of displaced echoes air around and sound of  bird and ’plane A swallow’s glittering chitter.

You must not wonder, though you think it strange, To see me hold my louring head so low, And that mine eyes take no delight to range About the gleams which on your face do grow. The mouse which once hath broken out of trap Is seldom ’ticèd with the trustless bait, But lies aloof for fear of more mishap, And feedeth still in doubt of deep deceit. The scorchèd fly, which once hath ’scaped the flame, Will hardly come to play again with fire, Whereby I learn that grievous is the game Which follows fancy dazzled by desire: So that I wink or else hold down my head, Because your blazing eyes my bale have bred.

Because she broke your heart,Shannon’s a badge— a seven-letter skidmark that scars up across your chest, a flare of indelible script. Between Death or Glory, and Mama, she rages, scales the trellis of your rib cage; her red hair swings down to bracket your ankles, whip up the braid of your backbone, cuff your wrists.  She keeps you sleepless with her afterimage, and each pinned and martyred limb aches for more. Her memory wraps you like a vise. How simple the pain that trails and graces the length of your body.  How it fans, blazes, writes itself over in the blood’s tightening sighs, bruises into wisdom you have no name for.

Fortune hath taken thee away, my love, My life’s soul and my soul’s heaven above; Fortune hath taken thee away, my princess; My only light and my true fancy’s mistress. Fortune hath taken all away from me, Fortune hath taken all by taking thee. Dead to all joy, I only live to woe, So fortune now becomes my mortal foe. In vain you eyes, you eyes do waste your tears, In vain you sighs do smoke forth my despairs, In vain you search the earth and heaven above, In vain you search, for fortune rules in love. Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s hands, Thus now I leave my love in fortune’s bands, And only love the sorrows due to me; Sorrow henceforth it shall my princess be. I joy in this, that fortune conquers kings; Fortune that rules on earth and earthly things Hath taken my love in spite of Cupid’s might; So blind a dame did never Cupid right. With wisdom’s eyes had but blind Cupid seen, Then had my love my love for ever been; But love farewell; though fortune conquer thee, No fortune base shall ever alter me.

After the fierce midsummer all ablaze Has burned itself to ashes, and expires In the intensity of its own fires, There come the mellow, mild, St. Martin days Crowned with the calm of peace, but sad with haze. So after Love has led us, till he tires Of his own throes, and torments, and desires, Comes large-eyed friendship: with a restful gaze, He beckons us to follow, and across Cool verdant vales we wander free from care. Is it a touch of frost lies in the air? Why are we haunted with a sense of loss? We do not wish the pain back, or the heat; And yet, and yet, these days are incomplete.