Twelve Months

Didn’t really like this poem very much. Trying to clean it up a bit.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when you were elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my desperate economics in your absence;
You are my unexpected affluence, my blossoming prosperity:

You are the whispered promise of a day without night.
You are the promise of a night strewn with suns.

Were you always there at the corners of the world?
I would like to think so, that you were present

even in my poverty, even in my debasement.
I would like to think you were around a corner.

Was I really ever without you? I suppose there was a time
when I was elsewhere in body, elsewhere in dreams.

I shudder now at my meagre aspirations
Scrabbling in dust to disinter a sickening fiction.

I shudder now that you might not have offered yourself
as my shadow past and exuberant future.

That you might not have said, Sell everything for me.
I sold everything, and months later, do not miss myself.