Next Town Over (a thousand miles away)

I am moving from this land babe
and that rock on your finger won’t
weigh down these greedy feet
I have seen those tears before
surfing the edges of your lost beauty
I have seen the same quiver in your lips
as your arms stretch for the air I use to wear
Such redundancies lost their bite long ago
I now lack the warmth tenderness delivers
and roam, indifferent, in a gluttonous home,
sadly adorned with a debt of shivered armor

I am leaving you babe for a forgotten place
Your benevolence and baubles be gone
I now sail, with withered conscious, uncertainty’s mistress,
she’s a wicked one who tempts a curious ego
I now lay in her bed and taste her bitter wine,
kiss her ripe venom and bite her rotten apple
She repays me with broken mornings and midnight pain
and an ever growing collection of unsavory hobbies
This new one is for the serpent and his sly tongue,
She'll be my sin for breakfast, a little salvation for lunch
and a dip into the lake of fire for an after dinner dessert
So as to sweeten the harsh release of my oratorical indulgences,
those constant cacophony of words filled with restless static,
forever beguiled by the guilt of a temperamental palette

Where I go my dear you may follow yet burn
so save your skin for a shed more worthy
I go where I always knew I’d end up,
a destination seemingly predetermined at birth
You lost me some time ago though I had never left
but now I go where all the cold beds await
Where embraces glide through the living like ghosts,
spectres caught between our love and hate,
that immense divide our time gorged itself on
So now, with frigid determination, I trail the beast
leaving you with naught but the vacant footprints
of a husband weak with desires and regrets

I am fading in the distance my love
I've left your womb for the barren beyond
Do you think of me often as the sun falls
below the empty horizon forever mindful?
Does my seat at the dinner table hold another?
A man with fruitful smiles and little sorrow maybe?
One who holds within his hands a hefty bounty,
paying in full all your wants and needs
that at one time emptied my emotional pockets
Is he a lover to make Eros shrink in shame?
Does his brow at this moment rest on your bosom
in a repose the heavens once granted us?
I ponder these thoughts with an acute regularity
as my infant home grows ever more hollow
as the list of my self-inflicted absentees lengthens

I dream of you often and yet very little
These are my fevers as I trek these ethers,
lost in the memories of many but forever lingering
I've giving shards of my heart so heavy with penance
to any who would share kind words or break bread
I've spoken to the Gods above and below
and shared empty spaces with angels and demons alike
I've plundered the thoughts of great minds
and I've walked the world to only move a town over
Yet still I haven’t discovered the words to give to you
neither would I be able to escape the panic
if I were to find myself within your walls

I desire the scoundrel Time and his henchmen
The moments before the tempest and its results
I want a home of love to make the neighbors ill,
a fervent caress to make St. Valentine jealous
and cause a Libertine to rethink such corrosive paths
I desire the kiss that decays foundations strong with cynicism
and the family that creates a dynasty in my name
These are the melodramas I behold within this empty bed
allowing me to fantasize about an era when gazes shook ground
when your smile and mine smirked in unison
and hands connected with equal pressure
Those years when our push and pull were mathematics,
a complicated equation perfected in its simplistic answer
I want a time when grievances were myths to our ears,
A time when all this was beautiful in its clichés

But I am gone now babe
and so are you
The rest is the dust of glory gone
What is left is nothing but the patina
reminding the body and mind
of a coupling beyond happenstance,
yet doomed by cruel and precise inevitability
A device allowing for the measurement
of a time when I had it all

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