Please don’t leave me, just forget everything that can be forgotten, the smell the sound the extra hope of it all. Those who’ve fled forget the times of misunderstanding, the time we lost, the moments when you sent that letter, the moment when I read it, those who know how to forget those murderous hours feel my happy heart evaporating for you.
Don’t leave me, please don’t leave me, I have your memories in my skin, I do. You know I do.
I offer to you pearls of rain from a country where it doesn’t rain. I will dig in the dirt, my every nail broken and bloody, even after my death to cover your body with gold and light. I will make a country where love will be king, love will be the law, you will be the queen. Let me crown you. Let me stake the only claim that matters, the claim of belonging to you.
Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I have your memories in my skin, I do. You know I do.
I will make up beautiful and meaningless words and I will say them to you, the words of lovers, the words of love, the words of memory and fate and kissing silently only hearts can kiss. I will tell you the story of this king who died without having being able to meet you. If only we had have met and held our hands quiet and gentle. I would have lain down in the snow for you, and this would have been the singing of a soul as pure as the ringing of a bell signalling the end of the war, the end of every war ever waged.
Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I have your memories in my skin, I do. You know I do.
We have often seen the fire leaping again from some old volcano, that we all thought was too fucking old for this shit anymore and it seems as if the very earth is on fire, our every soul illuminated like the wheat of the very best April, the sky in flames and you and I we cannot be married in black and red so we paint our skin and our skin paints us, we have lost everything, we have lost all memory and razed our earth around us.
Don’t leave me, don’t leave me, I have your memories in my skin, I do. You know I do.
Don’t leave me; I won’t cry any more, I won’t talk any more, I will simply hide myself here, looking at you dancing and smiling and listening to you singing and then laughing, let me become the shadow of your shadow, the shadow of your hand, the shadow of your dog.
Let me be the shadow of your dog.
Just don’t leave me.
eleanor j jackson 