Recovering The Sense Of Self Poem by Butch Decatoria

Now that we are lungs of our own,
no longer governed by each other
or good-humored light,
angled to make us beautiful;
I leave, tightly grappled within,
as if still in genuflect
still spinning
inside our billowing confessions,
two bodies conquered by cool
curious, cunning damnation...

A friend,
in her venues of Valentines,
a countess of stones thrown
proffers me the hangman's colloquial
"You still feel him...? "
nodding, I recall
the contours & colors of love's collision
"You just keep feeling it,
however much you wish it stop.
Feel it- feel it all,
there's no prompt drug
to make it go away..."

She coddles my sloth of shoulders
with ginger wisdom of grandmothers.
Nodding, I give in
to the germinating futility...

I still remember him
blowing out the candles
at our small table
with our unfinished meal;
how we thatched anger-strangled hearts
with saffron sauces of exasperation...
each etching kiss
close to a divine cure,
each curve of our crude pose
close-captioned
for the appetite-impaired...

Each saline scurrying tear,
each lonely-wilderness of day,
I force a sort of Nut-cracker's strength
not to feel
that barrel-hollow loss
that gallery of Use-To-Be's

and my friend,
in her Carmen wisdom,
is surgeon savant
stitches me up,
I am less in swarms of his tangibility;
I breathe less of his fetch
flooding
I am slowly becoming
just a single prefix,

my own word and crutch
no matter how often I recall
the music of his touch
or all the colors

we felt so much...