I might not know what love is, but I know
what it is not: this brief and frenzied fall,
of tangled leaves and hair all red. You’ll go
and I’ll be glad, and I’ll not follow. All
my heart says no to you, as though you weren’t
a love that I had longed for past recall.

You might have been the fire that finally burnt
the dead leaves of my heart. And it was fire,
I won’t deny you that. And lessons learnt
by fire don’t fade; the nerves acquire
aversions deeper than the taste of pain
the mind recalls, and deeper than desire.