I walk barefoot on your smoldering coals

as you paint my pain in hues of crimson.

Deranged images hover on my ceiling

as I lie on bed of broken crushed dreams,

crawling on ground with clipped wings.

Sound reverberates as you twist my gut,

your black tide runs dry upon my shore -

emotionless starvation in hollow drums.

Night chaperones darkness in sobbing clouds

while you rob the diamonds from my crown,

replacing them with thorns of the damned,

tattered memories wearing mourning veil.

I trowel over the rough patches to polish hurt,

glue my heart together, absorb into my chest

gather my rasping pain to learn to live

hearing redeeming messages in my grief.

A thousand years from now, there will be

            NO TEARS FOR YOU.

It is written

    In dried blood

         In the wood

     At the bottom

Of my dresser,

     Scratched with a safety pin

          That was pulled from the dry cleaning

     That he never got a chance to give me.

He wrote it there as he bled on the floor,

     Where he fell when the monster took his life

          He wrote the name of the monster, for he knew it well,

     But he wrote something else, beneath the name,

Something he knew I would be the one to see.

     It was a simple message, that wouldn't mean much

          To someone who didn't know him, but it meant something to me.

     It was only two letters- OK.   To anyone else, this might not mean anything.

Someone else might have thought that he should have said I love you,

     Or some such other platitude, but it was so much more, a symbol of our one heart.

          It was our own special code, our nonverbal language.   It meant we had fought,

     And we were sorry, and that it was all right because we knew we still loved each other.

I look at it every day, and I cry my heart out, because I know I can never say it back.