The View From Your Shelf

My heart is splitting open in the most painful way, and you know what happens now, don't you? As I collapse towards oblivion, you will watch with eyes wider than the sky and feel maybe the pinch of sweet stinging victory, because now you know, don't you, that the lies worked their way in and with roots like snakes ate away at my self-possession till suddenly my heart sat in a jar on your shelf, acid eating away and the veins floating empty like tattered ribbons from Christmas. Maybe misunderstanding put the veil over your eyes to mine, sent illusions swirling between us like dust motes in the afternoon light, and maybe I was just a grainy image on the edge of your screen, out of focus, stage left, outshone so that maybe you couldn't see what you were doing to me. Or it could be that scattered crows winged down from the rain-heavy clouds and flapped about you dressed in black like mourners, their beaks heavy and clumsy, dipping like the sewing machine, stabbing to the rhythm of synchronized heartbeats till your eyes bled red and empty and you were blind to reality like you wanted all along. Maybe that's where it all went wrong, and when the crows flew away they took your eyes with them, masquerading as your heart, and they took you up there to heights only reached on borrowed wings, and when your eyes opened, they fell in love with the clouds, and so that's where you went, isn't it? You pushed off from the ground, and I suppose that without your eyes, you thought maybe you flew, but I saw it all and I know. The ground collapsed in on itself as you strained to escape gravity and the truth of the matter is that you fell a long way from the absent stability of your empty ambitions, plummeting past the scattered slides of your life so the memories are out of order, slipping too fast into the brighter memory of tomorrow. But whether the cataracts of vision were self-inflicted or fate, the facts stay in the same neat order, and so it's still true that I lost myself, that I need you, that I hate you love you and where have you gone?