Recurrency ★★

Let me speak of echoes.

There are two true monsters I have known,
vain attractive bewitching creatures
each as cruel and elusive as the other.

In a way
the latter came to feel
as a shortened parody
of the one that came before;
both were marked
by an error of the body
and by a tattoo on the breast,
a design of their own fabrication,
as if the ink had sunk into their very flesh
and twisted their hearts.

In my memory they had eyes to bite the soul
though one wore blue and the other honey.
They shared a similar tastes in clothes,
and obviously in women ,
because they both sank their claws in me.
For a time anyway.

Our meeting was
a story told twice by different tellers,
starting with a concert missed
that led to sharing drinks with his friends
then slipping into his arms,
and then into his bed,
and then not doing anything more
but sleep.

The endings follow
and are always bitter
both took with them,
from me,
besides the grief and biting teeth,
besides my pride,
a book with a story
one separate from what was told on its pages,
and one I still would find
worth fighting over.

Do I receive such men unto me
as recurring punishment of past misdoings?
Am I haunted by some ghost
with a memory come unwound
trapped repeating it's story time and time again?
Or is it I who is cursed to repeat the same refrain?
a song, a dismissal
a karmic cycle

And if I looked would I find others?
Did the girl who called me names in grade school
in sleep blossom inky flowers
upon her thin breast?
Is life just you and I
sitting around a campfire
singing rounds
each picking up the last in endless echoes
each the same but slightly different
until we all collapse in sleep?