It would have been your birthday

Tried to light candles with fractured matches,

Watching straining lick of flame reach,

Like our broken fingertips,

Across the bruised void of the unsaid

Suddenly

Impenetrable broken curls of Cyrillic

dissipated from the paper

And, as I tried to catch

each elaboration of glyphic, each

gasped stroke of numeral,

I remembered thrusting embossings of calendar

into my palm and urging its beat to become

reciprocal;

giving mouth to mouth to the gaping wounds

of a ruined astrology of amputation;

In the confusion,

my fingertips coated in school-boy charcoal,

I overlooked those splinters of you that remained,

and only now have

extracted these blackened implants

I didn’t know before

from the forearms of memory

—

In crinkled plastic packets, I finger

the ending frays of bright blue ribbon;

take cellotape across each depression and

wait, with raisèd pen,

to join my ink to yours again.