Night refrains

How to this day as they say I wake up with your face in my hands and your scent all around me. How our youth stays with us in these humiliations by desire, in floods of more or less clichéd phrases we must finally disown (or stage as another’s ordeal or transform into affirmations of absence): outbursts of fullness and tenderness, the extreme solitude of unequal love, you left a hole I can’t fill, etc. Dream my sleep, ache my ache for this now unreal almost meaningless ‘you’ turned inwards. These fragments poor substitutes having arisen as substitutes; these night refrains all leading back to ‘you’, repeated over and over like tributes or penances.