epitaph – Karina Longo

July 28, 2026

“always have loved you and still do”,

so you once knew how to use words, knew how not to choke on buzzing love and rot from the inside in a carnage of all your so-called sins, just never for me, never to me; you pace around my room like a hungry ghost, a shakespearean phantom, not romeo though, you’d like to think so in some pink-stained dream where maybe, maybe, you hold the poison and only smell it, then maybe collapses like a blood sunset stolen from back when you were still a man; but love, you are a man, one buried in sand for so long he’s forgotten the shape of anything gleaming in plain sight, your throat dry and yet you won’t reach for my tongue or any form of dripping liquid that could smooth down the thirst, you’ll make the sign of the cross and walk away from anything that reflects what you’ve decided is senseless and harsh and old, a lovely, delirious fool you are, but maybe that’s the curse of troubadours, to play hamlet to a line of ophelias and then weep in secret at each ivy-framed tomb, your tears soaking into dry earth as if it were still clay, imagining there’s something left to build out of sleep other than songs to haunt all the spirits swallowed whole by crushed daisies