Closure

There are nights
the world loosens from its axis-

streets empty,
windows dim,
the last train carries home
someone who no longer
wants to arrive.

Somewhere beneath
all the unrequited poetry,
the old machine quietens.

There will be no gods,
no mirrors, no sacred wounds
to close shut at
the edge of grief.

You carried your storms
like lit candles through
an abandoned subway.

I carried silence
like a second person
through every
conversation.

For a while, we believed
we were made holy.

But love is not always
a thing that stays.

Sometimes it is simply
the thing that opens,
then leaves you changed,
at least enough to start again.

I do not regret it.

Not the late-night laughter,
Nor the fractured songs,

Nor the terrible longing
of trying to reach each other
across a b*****d continent
we did not come to conquer.

There were moments
You made the world feel
briefly inhabitable again.

That is not nothing.

But the tide moves
even through stubborn youth-
that desperate religion that
cannot hold out against time
forever.

So let our poems drift out now
into their own weather.

Let tired ghosts rest
against your bedroom wall.

Somewhere,
beyond all this hurt,
the morning’s oyster shell
continues to prise apart
its salt-bright pearls,
offering opaline petals
to the earth-

asking nothing of us,
keeping nothing from us,

quietly leaving behind
a love choosing not to possess.