Casey Gilfillan

You give it to me, and I am mistaken to think it is mine. I close fist with the mind to grasp, I squeeze and it melts through the gaps of flesh like ice cream in the sun. The blood of dead opportunity evading my possession, I open and it has stained. My hands motion towards one another, providing tension that might reject your shadow from its looming hold. But you remain and the hands consume the guilt, they project it down to the wrist. 

You owe me nothing, and how I wish that was not the guiding motivation. Instead you gravitate to vocation of the sensory, wherever fantasy and lust might direct you. You run like a dog after the bone; I was the bone for a moment, thrown from her hand. An insatiable amnesiac, the moment another is presented your mind is blank on the fuel of desire. Break out into the four-legged sprint, impress her with the antagonism of your pursuit.

You bombard and then evaporate, like a bad storm I should have seen coming. Too bad I never check the weather; there is nothing to be glamorized about being caught up in the moment. I am left in the starved aftermath of your abdication, tatters and remnants flail haphazardly in the momentum of your flee. And I know it is the limit of your facticity; you can only be what you are. I can only be as ignorant as I am enthralled.

You are the one who drains from rather than adding to the value of experience. It is too late when I notice, I am blinded by the euphoria of exsanguination. The amber molasses of your gaze stills and then debilitates upon detachment. And then I am stuck in the sore body of absence, while you run off to collect the vigor of innocence. I unclench my fist, and it is not an object to hold, but the clotting of a wound.