The Foreign Melody Stuck on my Lips

Face retrieved from
the discarded burning
of an old flame

beautiful in your recklessness
I loved your spirit for that
but your spirit didn’t see me

we were two sides of the same hurt,
I thought,
you were the unforgotten beginning
and I was a much inferior chapter
to a story with an ending that
we both didn’t see coming

but you were a star,
volatile, gravitational,
flanked on all sides by darkness,
exquisite even during
those drunken nights when
I could have given you
a light for your cigarette
and you could have complimented
me on my shoes which
I wore to impress you, even
though they murdered my feet

you changed your hair
and I thought to myself,
I could try but would never
be anything like you,
or maybe I was you
in a parallel universe

the serifs on the words to
your tattoos and the burnished
gold on your many piercings
like a complex password
to a world that is closed to me

there was an adamant grace
to your lack of inhibitions

you were like the raw
South African sapphires that
he hid in a special place
at his house, you know where,
right next to his stash of weed
and your old love letters

I always envied the way you’d strut
across the España Boulevard traffic,
brushing off the moonlight
splayed across your amaretto skin

our hours belonged
to the same clock,
and we knew the same people,
and hell, bumped to the same
smoky beats on the same nights

but we only circled each other,
like poles in a magnetic field

because it’s not really
a socially acceptable thing
for me to want to be friends
with the woman who broke
the heart of the man
who was about to break mine