changeling (new title)

nobody tells you that you're going to have to turn
your heart into old shoe leather one day,
shred pictures, sleep with the dog.

he must've been inside me a thousand times,
but who counts these things?
who thinks the time will come when
it's the last mouth against mouth,
the final creak of the bed, come midnight?

his footprints haunt my house;
they lead everywhere, yet nowhere.

he left before the plot had ended.
no silver dropped from a Roman palm.
no poison or beheadings or, god forbid,
a drowning, but

like a vampire, he has taken my blood.
my veins shred open like rice paper,
spilling bad love poems into the night.

i have no pulse.
no tears.

i am as white as the winter's rain.