Dave Hughes: Don’t Play with Dead Things

You shouldn’t, everyone knows that.
It’s a knowledge for most mammals.
Things that have expired,
are to be left unmolested.
It runs deep,
a law of nature,
the base understanding that,
to do so will do harm,
will be painful,
will be a waste of time.
Why then?
Won’t you let this go.
The path of our love has run true,
and run out.
We,
are run out.
What we had is dead as a doornail,
flat as a pancake.
It’s a bloated stinking corpse stuck on a snarl in the Chicago river.
It’s alive only in the habituated responses
of two actors who haven’t realized the show is in reruns.
Both of us playing a part
so the other doesn’t see
that the person they fell in love with,
has ceased to exist.
Is dead.
So quit fucking with it.