In a room without stars ...

Originally written August 15, 2005

In a room without stars, without

the time telling us when to go ...

this had become my home.

I had no right to stay, never

knowing when to say farewell

to the clothes of our agreement.

Perhaps it had been easier for you

to wear yourself out with my attention.

I remember grazing naked over the plains,

the landscape slender like your abdomen, with

a hint of shrubbery where the seeds

had been sown before daylight.

I remember hearing the hoeing of rain

outside in the distant hallway, where

the sun kept thrusting its torpid rays

inside the throes of a dense calm.

Not here, not where I thought

the void had been filled with stars,

the memory of your scent rubbing off

with the pretense of your breathing.

I remember myself without guilt,

enthralled by the death of my egregiousness.

Don't you miss this thing of beauty,

a heart beating without a chest?

A body walking without a head?

I could not find any other purpose

as mild as an untamed beast, yet milder

than its incorrigible tamer.

I once had your arms to house me,

the foundations of a room without stars.

Or had they been my own arms,

desperately holding onto the gutters

of the roof I had built over myself?

The first and the last, the compromises,

took two days too easy to forget.

I continued to walk the road alone

still trapped inside your room, or me,

trapped in my own disillusionment.

Would I have had the right to leave, when
now that I'm in my own room,
I realize I hadn't been guided accordingly?

I lit the sky with a perfect match

and pretended forgetting I miss it so badly.

I faked being intimate with the stars

and I don't feel shame for having done it.