Leave, and forever be spared the knowledge
that you failed in some way to halt the decay.
Let go of the ways you once knew to dredge
the sands beneath the earth, for the bravest men-women
like me, and Fuad, and my six classes of champions;
leave, and let entropy have her Brightest Day.
Leave, and let die all the ways you promised
that you would take care of the gays,
the marginalised, the heavily and intensely Bound;
those who have no hope of being anything but stray
in the grand scheme of things.
In the ways you said you would fight on, and desist, and lay
the groundwork for the final defeat—this time really final—
of every last one of your hungry, ravenous
mistakes.
They keep coming for me, in the dreaming dark.
Nothing I do satiates
their lunges, their power, their hunger, the sour
taste left in the mouth, as they seek to bite me to death,
and regrettably, maybe even to their horror,
they discover that I am Clare the cheerleader a quadrillion times over.
Everything they do regenerates
me. Gives me back the strength
that I would not have to have, if you had just been present enough
to notice what you did.
To realise that this world didn’t have to fall into the sin
that you stupidly redefined as any kind of emptiness, or falseness within
when not all empty mirrors are hallowed wrecks
waiting to be turned into riches.
Not all bound-bodies and flicker-lives
deserve to left covered in so many hundreds of thousands of stitches
from where you should have stepped up.
You should have denied them what they thought this teacher
would be able to abide by, which is this:
A dance, a flicker, a life gone by so quickly
you didn’t even glimpse one iota, one dot, one feature—
all your attention was too focused, instead,
on how every closet and star-cluster still hides
what you left behind, and all the other creatures.