The Last Poem I Will Ever Write About You

It’s really gross,
the people I find myself writing about
at 2:30 in the morning
when I can’t sleep.
I always seem to come back to you.

I have spent
over half my life
writing about you.
You have been the muse behind
all of my most-hated poems.
I wrote a book about you once,
in an effort
to let you go.

You are my desperate place;
My well
absent of water,
filled with nothing but dead things
and rotting carcasses
of the promises
you couldn’t keep.
A cemetery
of all the potential
you let go;
This place,
abandoned and dry,
where I now understand
nothing between us
was ever meant grow.

Sometimes
on nights like these,
I still visit
with the hope
that the sound of your name
in my voice
cascading down this well
will echo back
some kind of inspiration
for closure.
All I find
is darkness,
silence,
and decay.

It hurts to admit
that after all of this healing,
time,
and space
that I have put between myself
and everything you put me through,
you still show up in my dreams sometimes.

Lately,
my nightmares welcome you;
REM cycles
still haunted by your face
and the sound of your breathing
still present in the night.
In these dreams,
I find myself lying next to you
in disbelief as to how
or why
I would ever let you so close to me again.

In these dreams,
we are always in your bedroom,
because I never trusted you enough
to let you into my own.
In your bed,
I fear being swallowed whole
by the deception between your sheets
while outside your bedroom window,
snow falls in the streets:
A silent surrender
beneath the streetlight’s glow.
The same streetlights
I used to stand under
praying
to keep the nightmares about you away,
and for another set of brown eyes
to call home.

In my bed of prayers unanswered,
I wrap myself
in a cocoon of memories
and end up tangled
in dreams
of tarnished notions of forever.
We were a temporary thing
that always felt falsely important;
Like dying,
or the manipulation of living
with your misconceptions
of what it meant
to love someone.

I hate to admit
I’ve still got organs that are involuntarily invested
and you
are still holding on to my subconscious.
Every morning that I wake up,
I thank God
that your mood swings
and true intentions
are no longer mine to decode.
You are nothing to me now,
except one last compilation
of pretty words
in one of my latest,
most-hated poems.

Now
more trigger to my gag reflexes
than muse,
I promise
this is the last poem
I will ever write about you.