Am I loveless?

Always the scent of flowering. The heady onset. Yet, this season…the slow swoon of distance. The undeniable space between fire and ash.

I yearn…but for no one. They are all gone. Ancient darlings, possible flames. Instead, I walk along the road of last year’s ardour. Further away than ever. Little more than syllables now. Bittersweet exhalations.

It is not for their touch that I pine tonight, nor for the receipt of their love. Rather, it is for the giving of mine.

The locus of my longing is the explosion of my loving. Like the nascent blooms, harkening to the siren of light. An elemental emergence, arising from a core dynamic.

Or is it perhaps the addict’s pang? A twisting in the gut, a hunger for one last maddening smack of holy ruin. Is this the day I see it all with sober clarity?

I am loveless. It is done.

Seven years since the last dance. Little more than tepid tenderness since then. And this, the wordy evocation of erstwhile inferno, and all the allowable fictions of art. The lovely, coded relics. Etched on cold terrain.

I would set aside the florid pen, silence the keening song, but…oh, suffering…why are you so intoxicating?

Now the rush of love has become the sweet, gold sigh. In the absence of desire…desire. If not you, the elevating delirium of the space you leave vacant.

Sensing spring, I walk upon crunching leaves.

I have loved you so…the echoes still turn my head…but now in the quiet, sedimentary valley, it is the perfume of ending that floods my senses.

The empty space is not empty. For it is the shape of fullness.