Where do you draw the line, they say.
This is where I draw the line.
You don’t call,
    so I don’t call.
You don’t text,
    so I don’t text.
You never looked me in the eye
so why should my coffee be stained
by the storm that is always brewing in yours?
You crossed the line
    when every interaction became a reaction
    a filthy spade
    carrying the bones of our shared past.
The sluggish dismemberment of nearly a decade
    clings to your violent silence,
    uncanny and brutally beautiful.
In the shared sorrow of losing something old –
set adrift aeons apart
as though it were not one thing
but two –
blossoms a red space for something or somewhere new.
Articulated more fully by carefully curated spikes of rage
    boxes of polaroid patriarchy delineate the passage
    from snow white to the darkest tundra
    a revenge march rent asunder.
And as the great beast spreads her wings to draw
    that final breath before casting off
    a graceful arc from thesis to synthesis
    to savage antithesis and back again
the uncomfortable ease of quietude grips us
    and we sink ever more deeply
    into the ebb and flow of this jagged and broken age.