Five weeks I’d known you, yet …

Did you really care so much, or was it for effect?

A try for my attention. And it failed and failed,

Too influenced by Curtis and Cobain,

White circles, scattered in your hand,

Their power just threat.

And so I ran, first time I ran?

And now, rotund and middle aged,

Cricket and slippers, farmers market fruit,

A life in rural France,

What idyll might you have missed?

What more resolve?

One more week?

One more month?

How long would it have taken before you really …

Would you ever?

Never, I know, not like this.

And this was such a suicide,

Such betrayal,

Such failure,

Loss.

He’s gone, like you never,

And must I go on?

Seventeen white pills, count them,

One for each year and one we never,

The choice he made hangs bitter,

In my mouth, like those sweet pills.

And I watch my own seventeen,

In your small French idyll,

Wonder what revenge on who,

And when and why and if …

A note would lay the trail

Of blame, but what’s the point?

A small revenge,

Inadequate,

And you’re not him.

I want to scream,

But in this room,

I would be heard,

And not by you (nor him).

I grip the wooden frame.

Remembering betrayal,

Anger defrays and dissipates until,

I take the traitorous seventeen,

Not to my mouth but to another gaping yaw.

I throw each pill,

Unsatisfying,

No smash.

No splash.

I cannot find the will to run,

As down below the franco-drone.

I don’t matter here.

No-one knows.

Joy divided, fractures.

Watch each pill dissolve,

Molecules swim,

Into new void.