mabel_____

Libertine.


I have not died.
Though I did die with our life.

Your skin hurts me,
Mercury,
where it touches your new wife.

*
It is three days from the day
I first knew I would love you.

We twined the sheets,
We shared regrets,
Spring was green and lenient,
And we were so enormous,
you thought yourself well.

But hell came to call, an army
of empty bottles: you emptier,
treating your fever, a fear
the ringed your blue eyes red.
I didnt know

You had died.
But she, she knew you so well, with

her own army,
Mercury,
her own hell. And she was not afraid.

Overnight she made you
a hero. What could be better?
What could be worse. This,
our hearse: for I loved you,
but you were never mine.

I dream her face is made of dirt.
I dream I smash her into clots.

Your child bride is
enormously hollow.
She took you down in one
great swallow. Now
your faces are the same. Not
hers and yours, yours and his:
the Libertine

who left her behind. But look!
how perfectly his role suits
you. No need, even, to take
in the sleeves. Was it Steve?
He's just your size.

*

You've fled to the West Coast,
free, almost, from my ghost
and the life we might have had.
the gardens we might have had,
the child we almost had,
the children we might have had.

We killed them all,
but I am not dead.
Though I did die with our life.

And you died on my bedroom floor,
Libertine. I don't love you any more.