I've Created Her

I’ve created her face, given her a chipped tooth
and a faded tattoo on her right wrist
that catches the sun
every time she dots the i’s in her letters to you.
The schizophrenic tangles of her long dark hair
that sometimes she, too, stains red,
pulled loosely back.

Her favorite color, paisley, plastered on the wall,
a jug of pinot grigio grasped between
sunset orange nails that she just painted
and already hates.

We meet in the seconds before sleep,
in the eternal moments of her coma
where she wears white, though black
suits her better, while somewhere in the company of cats
she embraces insomnia, nestled in the minor key
she holds for five long beats on a player piano.

I wonder how it feels to be wrapped in her skin,
prescriptions pumping to her capillaries,
bones still creaky from the crash, after so many years.
Maybe she has a blind spot, too, a promise
of a grey forever we’ll both spend without you.

She needs me like Thorazine,
but my fear is not
that she will snatch you back and leave me
in her plateau of dreams and smoke,
but that she was never real at all,
that even though I know the birthmark on her calf
and the paper snowflakes she snips apart
when she refuses to surrender to the call of sleep,
she has not created me.