The hole in my heart is emptied out.

He is gone for good,

the one who left so long ago.

Whom I chased through women and success,

lounging like a roman à clef

above this restlessness,

collecting attributes like dried leaves,

phone calls, sugar-covered memories—

it is not the hole that hurts,

but what you put in it, how you fill it,

the grade-school grammar of your loss.

And what is left is a whiff

of emptiness, past tense, italicized,

as irrelevant as that old man on a plane

back to gay Paris. As I, too,

become beside the point to myself, free,

doomed to start again, playing chicken

with oncoming identities,

learning lines, scratching lines to try to make sense

of unmarked ground.

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^{Source: About Time: Poems (Akashic Books 2025)}