Here lies what was,
our marriage,
splayed open on the cold steel table,
The body bag cannot hold it anymore.
Unfurl the sheets, love,
Slice through the already deepened flesh;
peer beneath the skin where bruises of neglect festered,
hidden under the guise of “but you know I love you”
Scalpel sharp, cut through the fabric of our years,
dissect the silence that grew like cancer between us.
Can you see, now, the haemorrhage of my heart unheard, unseen?
Probe deeper, where resentment clots,
solidified into the barricade of your heart I could never breach.
Can you measure the weight of your indifference? The volume of your hatred?
Its density, a silent killer, that choked the life from us slowly, agonisingly.
Lay bare the marrow, where dreams dissolved like brittle bones.
You’ll find the fractures, each one an echo of your promises unkept.
Pinpoint the source of our decay.
Was it in the nights you turned away,
leaving me to the hollow ache of your absence?
My tears as sweat on the sheets.
Or the days your words cut, sharp as any blade, leaving me to bleed silently?
Or the memory of your body running against the multitude of women unlike me?
Analyse the evidence, piece by piece.
The lie of your love, the betrayal and distance of your touch.
Can you deny the fingerprints of your disdain,
stamped upon every fragment of our disintegrated union?
Yes, love,
perform the autopsy.
Examine the lifeless corpse of what we were.
In the dissection, you will find your handprints, unmistakable,
on the very heart of our demise.
Seventy five percent yours, this death of us.
Twenty five percent mine, for fighting, resenting, believing, hoping, enduring.
We’re coroners here.
I stare at you and ask “What was real?”
You stare back at someone you really don’t know.
The stench is at par with the silence
Close the incision,
suture the wounds.
But know this, love, the scars will remain,
yet by His grace, the memory won’t.
Here lies what is,
our marriage,
splayed open on the cold steel table,
Preparing for an open casket funeral.