Love Knot

I could just walk away
if I remembered there was a way
not leading back
to the same strained knot
drawing tighter with each attempt to untie.

The knot that binds
Like a lock to echoing whines
of ‘mine’
‘mine’
‘mine ringing like knells,
appearing as bells
stitched as patterns
to the bodice of some other woman’s lace.

Bells waiting to be rung
and if I un-frayed, un-done.

So we fail
and we wonder,
how tangled a knot do we weave?

In this ceaseless scramble to assemble
the pieces of a bi-polar puzzle
that ultimately renders incompleteness?

Not a puzzle padlocked and buried
like your Persian cat, clinging to the curtains of its own defective life
long after the blinds of compassion were drawn
its essence faded and gone.

But a puzzle placed in a cardboard crypt,
safe in its closeted cemetery
lined with memento-mori.

All the broken pieces of our past
tightly bound with a tourniquet of love
that failed to staunch the razor’s flow.

Poetry by SS Matthews