11:48pm

I crouch,

feverish

on a shivering porch.

Blurred vehicles roll past

the river bank below,

yet I am miles away.

There are no stars,

though the sky is a deep navy haze

as a moonlit glow seeps through

the heavy blanket of clouds.

Trees that once framed

the shoreline below

slip away - silhouettes,

reduced to mere shadows.

Yet still, before me

a lone eucalypt stands,

concrete, unwavering.

eternal.

Its branches do not end abruptly,

they taper -

thin as hair,

melting into midnight sky.

In an unstill night

it stands stoically

in a darkness

we do not dare touch.

It does not fear, nor fret.

In the strongest of winds,

on the sharpest of nights

it will shed its dying branches

and bend with the wind.

Oh how I long to strip myself

of what is already dead.

Yet, when my hair frays

and falls,

it clogs up my shower drain

and water pools at my feet.

It sticks to the unwashed sheets

of all the men that saw me naked

and never called me back.

It’s pressed into the creases of the passenger seat

of a beat up convertible

where he insisted I have to

‘Finish what I started’.

It collects dust on the left side of my mattress,

still sunken from years of him loving me

and then turning over to face the wall

so he didn’t have to watch me cry.

So again, and again,

I will return to the eucalypt

At the edge

of the river bank .

I will taper my edges and melt into the sky,

dead branches will fall

softly like feathers,

swept away by downriver tresses.

No longer

will I swim up river.

No longer will I rug up

against the weather.

For the bitter cold

is merely a reminder

that I am alive despite the darkness,

that I exist in spite of the pain.

He does not own me because I shed a part of myself

and left it in his backseat,

I own me because I will always choose

to never go back to him and get it.