Exorcism

Go.
I ask this with everything that still pulses in me:
Go.

Erase your image from the photographs
my memory insists on developing
every night, without my consent.

Undo your voice
from the sentences I repeat
without meaning to.

Tear your presence
from the dreams where you arrive
as if you had never left.

Vanish from my synapses.
Erase your name from my tongue.
Leave the scent of my mornings,
the jolt of my meaningless afternoons.

I beg you, in desperation:
Go.

I want no more of your dream-crumbs,
your outstretched hand,
your belated tenderness,
your performative longing.

Let me live un-haunted.
I exorcise you in poem.
I tear you apart in verse.
I burn you
in the closed eye
of every sleepless night.

Go. Take your dark hair,
your rosy cheeks,
your narrow eyes,
your hopes, your intellect,
your quirks and your laments
and go.

Go.
Take your name in both languages,
and also your lies,
your filthy idealizations of me.

Take your childishness,
your immature hatred of me,
your confused readings of reality,
and your satin catwalks.

Go.
Step back two, three years
and forget me there.
Pretend I never existed.

Go. And let me live the other lives
that were my right.
And go live yours —
your better ones.

Go.
Take even what was good.
And disappear.