You are the emptiness, I the cold knife.

She is the name we do not speak,
The ghost-mirror in our intercourse,
A past link broken and still extant in sound but not
recognition.

I dream sometimes that we talk or that you have taken her,
and it is not I who has sent her away.
In waking life I have no interest
and no regrets though I regret
that I do not feel sadness for what I have done;
I feel as though my self is venemous.

Your rigours of analysis were once quaint and
they were refreshing:
To hear the breaking-downing as the Greeks say it
To read your thoughts tumble in a spin,
and yet make sense of the cacophony.

But in time what is dear grows restricting -
I received and gave nothing -
it was a non-state -
a half-state -
an abortive foetal state, that would no longer grow
and in stagnant water things seeded,
as of the old concepts of maggots and flies.

For every word you understood another understood,
and your understanding grew not exceptional but demanding.
Your patterns constrained me, I was numbers and letters.
And your attempts at knowing became attempts at binding.
And because you did not realise your folly and nor had I
I hated you, in parts. Your innocence was naiive -
Your seeking was grasping
Your search was monomaniacal without meaning
I had become another part of the world to you,
or so my id was telling me. I wished for difference, for the dream-spice.

And still the ghost echoes in old conversations and calls for catharsis.
Still it cries out and would be spoken of but will not
as of the path we walked once came choked with weeds we were
Spoken of, but not real, we were an echo of silence
and nothing more,
and in parts I hated you.

In simple words I cannot say it cross-wise like-wise or hope-wise, the wise-wise
I can only grasp at nothings and attempt
To make allusions in the oblique
To glance sidelong and catch the old eyes
To cast you off by boxing your memory
I do not miss you but your clothes remain in my house
Your scent on my pillow
Your voice in my ears remains as always
Your ghost is a stranger in my halls, and I cannot even care
to hate you.