And the good girls are at home with broken hearts
"You Say You're a Veteran"
Prologue.
In the hall, words still echo:
The nights are cold, they say, and these
Stones are unforgiving. He sits and listens
And drinks to the dead and wonders:
Where, where, just where does this end?
i.
In from the docks in his rough wool and leather,
He props her up on the arm of his lingering charm
And blinks away the frost as she slurs insults
About his parents and his person and his kin.
And he tells her how he's done this before,
More to break the silence than of any need for her to know.
Closing-time mercenary and love-sick savage
Glowing with headlights and streetlamps.
The key to his apartment fumbling cold in his hand
And she slumps dead asleep on his couch
And he's not surprised at all, it's just been another one of those nights.
ii.
(If she's Cain then he's Abel, because they will fight
And they will fight and they will fight and he will die.)
He suggests that she leave but stops when he sees
The wounded look on her face, like he's ripping out
Her heart and hanging it up to dry, to admire.
She looks at him with the hollow sleepy
Eyes of the dead. Hands lined with a
Thousand years of lost chances and animosity.
iii.
'This is all abridged to you, all reader's digests,'
She complains. 'This is not your life you're living.
This is just a summary'. She sits abandoned on
The couch and smokes his cigarettes, reads his magazines,
Burns holes in the carpet with fallen ashes.
He's scrubbing at the stains on the floor
(Under the spot where the heart had hung)
Because her mother's coming over for dinner
And she's a stone-cold bitch, she thinks he's
Ruining her little girl's life. Like he wouldn't run
If he had the chance.
iv.
He says;
'You've got so much love but there's nowhere for it to go
So it just sits there, unused and unwanted,
Staining the back of your teeth. You cough up the last
Lingering remains of your respectability, steal
Another daybreak and cheat your way to dusk.'
She's not listening, or, at least, she doesn't respond.
v.
He knows her skin; pale, pale skin, like alabaster
Or porcelain. like typing-paper, keeping the imprint of a
Touch for minutes after contact, like a signature,
Block letters on a dotted line and thick scrawled handwriting,
Promise of payback written on the insides of her thighs
Because to name is to know and he has named, he has named -
This is the coward's weapon and with each little death
(Those deaths that litter the house like ashes)
The savage in his living-room, half asleep and half drunk,
Respects him just a little less. She's already been captured
But he tears those buildings down again anyway,
Every night another fire.
vi.
In the third year of their war, she kisses him goodbye,
Asking for his remembrance and forgiveness and
Her share of their hardwired automatic responses
Because she's starting new, she says, she's
Leaving behind her old dead skin. She's leaving this place.
He hasn't paid the utilities for a few months now
And the heat's out, and the winter's bitter
With long-suffering cold. He rails at
These unforgiving stones and drunk-drenched soliloquies,
The creeping sickness that's killing him. He knows
That this is where it ends:
In the hall, words still echo.