amputee

Cold toes wake me from abysmal sleep,
your absence an infinite sharpness haunting
the cluttered hallways of my bones and blood.
I walk to the bathroom barefoot,
the shallow spill of half a moon
threading my pendular steps together,
treading in the rhythms of your ghost.

Your essence sticks to coffee steam
the way footsteps stick to footprints
full of falling rain, your place
held then devoured, passing swiftly,
sand sifting after sand, a path
erased in creation, a map
made entirely of burnt history.

Cold nights when once you clung to me
now lay naked in plain electric light,
measuring my body and the icy air against
the still squalor of my quiet bed.
Gone so long, how can you be here,
a toothache buried in my heart?
How far can a shadow reach,
cast by a single flame?