The right to forget

– please let me go

so I can begin

to exist again

let me walk away

in the quiet of dawn

to deaden the hurt

– let go of my hand

so it regains the colour

unheld hands have

– for new things to begin

one needn’t

constantly resist

you know, or oppose,

you know, one can

simply unlove

simply forget

– please accept the return of

those gifts you left me

– those warm memories

that comfort as much

as they hurt –

only then can there be

the quiet, slow forgetting

one needs to uncast the mind

to trick the brain to unlove

– the skin hunger

will make the soul wilt:

this is expected

– it will ravage the mind:

that is also expected

– but it is necessary, 

like a soothing hand

wiping the sweat off

the evil the night accrued

shushing me back to sleep

– please give me back

my beloved solitude

so I can start anew

from the fond place

I once called home

– without you and

the memories of you

each of them like

the smell of a burning barn,

the screams of trapped animals

prickling the nape of the neck

in the afternoon heat

– let all your whirlwinds die down

– let your sandstorm be swept in corners

– erase yourself off of the back of my eyelids

where I hope to find a measure of peace

– fade from the mirror when next to me

you took a place none can take again

– let the ice sheet you cast about my heart

slowly thaw into caves, dark blue clearing,

where echoes thin into whimpers

and long-lost feelings of imprecision

of nearaboutedness resurface

slowly, drop after drop,

enabling me to crawl back to my old,

blurry, incomplete, terrible self

– inevident but firm, solid,

but much more vast and secure

than the island we lived on

in the comfortableness 

a loved one’s arms bring

in the sureness one feels

in the omphalos of the storm

where the calm jades

and love sustains

yet brings about that feeling

that it can be lost,

untrusted, or simply obscured 

by other islands coming into view

as the sun wanes

and the hand that once caressed

now blanches at the joints

in one last effort to retain

– please let me go

– because if you do not

I shan’t have the strength

it takes to break

the sentiments

to cover the soul

with that thin veil

against doubt and

against myself

and appreciate

the forgetting

the fading

of what

you once

were