Echo

I was only a shadow when I first saw you across the bar; you barely noticed
as I marveled at your face, softly blurred by the neon-dark.
The bitter sting of two-hundred-proof tears lodged in my throat.
You grinned into your glass, grew drunk on your reflection.

 I made several pilgrimages to the bathroom, neurotically
checking my image in the glass, powdering my face, rehearsing what I'd say -
but love is a language I cannot navigate; I speak only in desire and obsession,
the yearning gnaw of want, as of a seed that longs to bloom in a fallow field. 

You smoked your cigarette, casting away embers the way one might
shoo away the unwanted caress of a forgotten lover.
I sat on the curb, cradling my stillborn
attempts at conversation, counting the striations in your iris,
constructing my own zodiac with the constellation of moles on your bicep,
but nothing could distract me. 

My loneliness is a contusion the size and shape of your knuckles.
I broke into your apartment and left a helix of my hair on your pillow.
I chiseled your name into my thigh with a heated paper clip
as I got high and imagined our limbs tangling like sweating knots
in an erotic asphyxiation victim’s noose.
I put the joint out on my wrist and didn’t feel a thing. 

When you kissed me, it was only so that you could drink your reflection
from the twin pools of my eyes.
I stood by, helpless, as you toppled to your death,
dropping deeper in love with your own image,
my shadow at your back growing faint.

 I let you drown, let the black, toothless gums of the earth swallow you.
Once a year, I visit this bar and order your favorite drink
while I sit alone in back. 

I document my changing face in the liquor’s ebb and flow,
dip my fingers into the gleam of my own reflection.
When I open my mouth, a single narcissus rests on my tongue
and you taste like the newsprint on yesterday’s paper.