"Fuck You, Twilight" and Other Poems by The Prolific and Eloquent Trixie

A Singular Combination

by Burraku_Pansa

Opening night comes, like always,
with new faces, eyes, hearts,
floating in the bursting light.

Memory takes a knife to me.

There was a face I met once,
a set of eyes, a heart,
set far apart from all the rest on the winding trail.
Singular in nature, she was a combination so bewitching
there could be no truth in it.

Half button, half a snub nose,
muzzle poised to blast a quip—
witty tongue a lashing whip
to set my teeth a’gnashing.
Passion sugared stings to such a bracing sour,
but the wounds didn’t age well.
Comfort rubbed the lye in
then stripped the nerves
till I soured on sour, too.

And there’s a powerful gravity I’d known in those eyes
in the young light,
when she didn’t know my mind was as there as my body.
It pulled at me, that set of sunbeams on my back,
closer and deeper, crushing with a padded vice
until I was too small to recognize.
Blacked and blued and bleeding,
but comfortable.

Comfortable.

Comfortable, comfortable.
Comfortable in the pattern,
the movements,
the standing wave goodbye that must have reverberated back to her.
Must have.
Must have known it in her heart
without my saying so
because I didn’t say it, so…
She just must have known.

Or we both felt it—
the barren divide.
I wouldn’t put it past a heart like that.
A heart that knows—
-its master
-what its master wants
-what its master has
A heart that knows how to weigh the points
and see the want in what it has
and know the want it doesn’t
and doesn’t want the wanting thing to hold it back like always.

Yes, it must have known.
Must have seen.
Magic and wishes and glitter and fire and bruises
can’t turn soil into a harvest
when there’s not a seed to be sown.
And no seed would do
if there weren’t a face,
a set of eyes,
and a heart selling it.

And if that law was in her
like I know it was—
like I know it must have been
because I knew it on her face,
because I knew it in her eyes,
because I knew it in my heart—
then why do I have to recall her combination
every time?

Everywhere I go?
Whenever I look out into the motes of life before my stage?
Wherever I hear the quick, rapturous beating and the struck gasp?

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder
and they say the guilty see their victims around every corner,
but they say I’ll gather no moss as long as I keep rolling.

Can they all be right?

Closing time for the night.
I think I’ll leave this town a bit sooner than I’d planned.