Your lover spends the majority of his afternoons
Thinking of cemeteries,
And how you said
Thinking about people through scotch bottles
Will turn their memories purple.
Your lover, now a bartender,
Serves disfigured Glen Fiddich bottles and believes intangible
Things like feelings still grow on trees;
And often asks irrelevant questions like
How does one love a woman like you,
Or why things that are yellow in colour
Don’t come with caution labels of “unhinged hopes”.
Your lover not 21 anymore,
Still drinks his whiskey mixed with withdrawal,
And recalls your memories through shades of purple;
Mauve, for how you smelled,
Electric violet, for your love of Led Zeppelin.
Your lover, now almost 25, still returns home
To unmade beds and absent lovers;
And on Sundays, they dig holes to bury self-deprecating
Self-love that’s two weeks stale.
At 27, your lover will contemplate.
How he had always been stuck with Stockholm syndrome
Whenever he lied next to you.
At 40, he will become colour-blind and won’t remember
How it felt to be with you.
Instead, at 42, your lover will write you a poem
Where you could be 18, and a ventriloquist somewhere
In Amsterdam, how your shows won’t come with
Prior notice periods of how you cannot
“Scream, cry or leave”.
Instead, your shows would come with trigger warnings
Like intimacy and of men being
Delicate, and how one of them
Saran wrapped you to a mailbox
Somewhere in Rome and
Never returned.
Your shows will be based on a series of monochromatic flashbacks
Of all the protagonists suffering from Helsinki syndrome
And how the world is collapsing due to young girls dying of
Angst and loneliness.
Your lover, now 58, and three suicide attempts later,
Can no longer remember how your skin
Felt, and neither can he trace this poem back to you.
Instead, your lover collapses every time
He thinks of you.
In a post-war August, your lover at 62 or 19
Will overdose on heroin and
Drown to death.