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splinterswerve
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
splinterswerve.hotmail.com

by Michael Hrytsak  

(2001)

 

A Relationship in Six Parts - Late Night Poem 1
Sitting, you and I, together
Quiet, entangled – gazing and wondering at each other
Lust held back, not wanting to disturb this tender time.

Should I have?
Would I have?
What if…

Strained thoughts and second guesses.
With a miraculous replay I would do it all the same.
I would still sit there with you.
I would still look into your magical eyes.
I would still sit there with you, longing for the moment to last forever.

 

A Relationship in Six Parts - Late Night Poem 2
I’ll tell you a secret
I think of you and smile
Even though I hate the thought of you.
The thought, not you.

I do not hate you my young love.
I could not.
Somehow you project hatred upon me – a cloak that cannot stay upon my shoulders.

I loved you. I told you everything and more.
I thirsted for you to pour your thoughts and fears into my cup.
I died parched.

Hatred of you doesn’t cross my mind.
Confusion, yes.
Hatred, impossible.
Giddy smirks paint my face in recollection.
A moment, frozen for eternity, overshadows your cruel abandonment.

 

A Relationship in Six Parts - Poem 3
Bitterness seeps to the surface like water on boggy ground after a cautious footstep,
Oozing to the top with little provocation.

Months have past in a blur.
A sense that things will never be the same come - accepted.
Change.
Yet, the acerbic remembrance, the aftertaste of realization, remains the same.

How I long to go a day without thinking of you.
It seems as the antacid of fond remembrance is not enough.
A day when I forget you is not enough.
A day when I stop recognizing that I haven’t thought of you, a dream.

For when I recall missing your recollection,
I return from where I came.

A Relationship in Six Parts - Poem 4
So, you’re fucking someone else now.
Slut. How many have you had?
We never did.
Want was not lacking, but neither was respect for what I thought you wanted.

I never saw the pert nipples on your precious and tiny breasts.
Nor did I linger, nose burrowing through the fine blonde matte that hinted from below your navel.

I wanted you to be mine and me to be yours.
You could have said, “No, I don’t want that from you,” and I would have been better.
Instead you said nothing, followed by lies.
Excuses that burned my trust.
Now I am sure that you have fucked the World and then some.
Roll-over and spread again,
They all want another go.

 

A Relationship in Six Parts - Poem 5
Your name will not go away.
I wait for it to vanish as you did,
But it peers around the corner, haunting me.

How many times had I seen or heard your name before I met you?
I wander and around every corner, in every paragraph, in every conversation I find your name, reminding me.

Reminding me that I wasn’t what you wanted - too old, too gangly, too nothing to you.
Reminding me that I wanted you, wanted the image I had of you.

I cannot forget, no matter how hard I would like to.

Over time I know it will disappear, this ghostly interruption.
Like the girl who ruined the full moon for me, for a time.
Like the girl who took music from me, for a time.
Like all of them, the taint of you on my life will wash away,
Leaving only the clean memories of a golden image.

 

A Relationship in Six Parts - New Girl
It is the way your eyes glow like dwindling coals in the blackness of a moonless night,
Or the way that your laugh flows from your mouth and waltzes around the room.

It is in these ways and the infinite others that I love you.
Without knowing you,
Without seeing you,
With nothing but will, hope, and the determined faith of a religious skeptic,

I love you and dream of the day we meet and I fall in love again.

 

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