You were jealous of the butterfly flock stuck in her eyes.
You determined that she’s a doll.
I told you that makes her easy to break.
Some people want that.
When I mistook love for a butterfly flock,
she was standing in a library spotlight,
batting the kaleidoscope wings
curled on her eyelids. I asked if she liked jazz
and stumbled in all the right places.
She found a drawing of mine that wasn’t finished
and when I coloured it in for her,
she said she would put it on her wall.
I killed hours and laid them at her feet.
She never wanted to spend more time.
Some people catch a lot of dust in their eyes,
or they just like blinking too much.
When my girlfriend called, I ignored it and texted
‘busy, call later, love you,’ most days.
She drew me a blueprint of a family,
a house, with a dog, that could run and we had kids
with names and I would golf at weekends
with her friends, who had names,
who spoke like reunions and I never made jokes,
because my tongue is a baseball bat, most days.
We didn’t have common interests in sport.
I gave her a stick of dynamite for our anniversary.
When I left, the decorators had finished
putting up blue wallpaper,
after two years of promising to turn up to do it.
Syllable Syndrome 