! ! ! For The Moment Poem by Elizabeth Tyease Collins

I held my hands out and tried to feel you beneath my
fingertips,
to feel some type of consciousness to keep me sane.
I open my eyes to see you there, standing there with your
eyes burning with hatred, clutching onto the edge of insanity.

I felt my heart beat to the rhythm of foregiveness,
to sing the sadness of your cheating, of your tears dried up on the stoop.
I wanted to get close enough to apologize for every sin that sent your heart ablaze,
but I was invisible to your existence.
Your eyes never lit up at my appearance,
your heart never skipped a beat with ever kiss I planted
on your cheeks,
your image of me never crumbled of my sinful fornication,
intertwined and anonymous lust.
I was no longer your good luck charm but the curse that bloodied his hands and made his heart turn to stone.

I was left that day with my heart in my hand and a knife in another,
bleeding every cry with every strike with every denial, with every denial with every regret, with every suspicioun, and every ounce of AGGRESSION was taken with each stab she lost herself,
I lost myself,
and she was as hollow as the coffin that she dug herself in and he merely stood...and laughed,
enraptured with the deceit of mess and massacre,
danger and withdrawal and he clapped his hands,
amused at his ex-lovers deeds.

A slow heartbeat of a vein hanging by a thread of herself.
She drew out a gasp and cut the thread of her life source and she fell,
and he looked, turned, and walked away.


Fin