You are preserved in wax, floating on the Dead Sea.

A poem

Mummified in my memory, a dim but stolid lamplight that does not flicker.

Many nights I ache to touch that light again.

The closer I get, though, I see not incandescence.

I see not you.

It is my reflection from your shiny exterior that draws me.

The warmth of my own heart.

For you never shone for me.

You stole my light, and pretended it belonged to you.

So I believed for a while that it did.

Now it is only the light of what I had once hoped we would be.

It's a false light, a phantom beacon that calls low and deep for me.

I turn away and trudge back to the sea.