Pause, & add your own intentions…

You found me at the worst possible time, but only in the sense in which a dog-walker finds a corpse in the woods:

It wasn’t your fault.

The words in this verse are replacing the excuses I’d prepared for presentation: words about falling, & nihilism & other self-pitying bullshit trying to play tragic… but the truth is never quite so ornate as I’d like to make it…

I told you that I’d become a mistake.

But that doesn’t make it ok…

I remember you as vulnerable insolence & timorous intelligence but I was too selfish to realise how much attention you gave to my words & how little you understood about my actions:

your skin

compelled me to write a poem across the inside of your left thigh & I think you found it charming.

That poem had been written for someone else…

Attention is the rarest & purest form of generosity*: you gave it to me & what did I give back to you?

Nothing:

it wasn’t that I didn’t care it was just that I hated everything…

So this is an attempt to apologise for the ugliness by replacing it with a failed attempt at elegance.

& that still doesn’t make it ok…