Falling

I am pretending you did not exist.

Ink nightly washes black

over my consciousness

and abandons me as morning seaweed

upon a foreign beach.

I am pretending we were simply

the sparkling imagination of some higher being,

our life together set below a singular epic sky

unrepeated

in future histories.

I am pretending I cannot taste you

each day as I do the sea air in my breath

when I am running,

my heart tied upon one foot,

ancient melancholy tied upon the other,

anxiously racing,

madly racing through lifetimes,

to find our brightened souls.

I see you in colors that don’t exist.

It is all that I see clearly.

and why I run.

—P. Matsumoto