It Was Simple

Before times were hard, they were simple. The dew bloomed in your 6AM eyes Your heart was a candle sat on a cottage table kitchen But hearts aren’t meant to be kept inside cottages Or barnside silos The wax dripped down onto your bare feet The strain on your foot from our forever hug creating sweat Wherein the little koi fish candle-droplets could swim The light has gone out from the last house on the block The funeral-home orange turns jet-black as nails of lost loves Now I sit in this armchair bleeding tiny death certificates For our memories, Fluffing the paint roller as sage grouse do with their plumage Whilst courting mates Putting our laughs in the fireplace as they wriggle away, Hiding themselves behind the white curtains as beetles. I am now standing at the top of a lighthouse that begs for you I have made a chain of enveloped letters across the lake So you can sigh your way back to me, one by one And rest your sea-scroll bones of yesterdays In the sand that has your eye crust somewhere in it And let the baby blue crabs crawl raw temptation back in your toes For I see you on the sandbar with your grave-keeper’s lamp Watching me like if they made a balloon of The moment a boy saw his first pet die. I once laid pellets on the carpeted staircase for my hamster One by one she’d crawl up the carpet and take them Moving on to the next, and then the next… I thought I was making her happy Giving her exercise, giving her food But she exploded when I put her back into her cage. Nine months and she was dead, gone. It was simple. The light has gone out from the last house on the block The funeral-home orange turns jet-black as nails of lost loves Now I sit in this armchair bleeding tiny death certificates For our memories.