The Joker's Ace

I have never believed in stars

and yet we crossed paths

like shooting stars —

crashing across the skies

and onto the ground

as if we were hope for love.

Except, we weren’t shooting stars.

You and I — we were comets.

Fire in the belly, rage in the entrails,

and glitter on the face.

Because, apparently,

you only matter

if you're photogenic —

or at least your sob story is.

You and I —

we didn’t have sob stories.

We were survivors.

Of dysfunctional parents,

broken families,

poisoned affections,

and all the poetries in between.

You — a volatile wife

to a reckless husband.

And I — an infamous wife-stealer.

That’s the kind of math

you learn long before calculus.

High school chemistry

would call it an anomalous equation —

not because the equation was wrong,

but because the elements were.

Love that blooms

at the grave of a dead love

doesn’t take long

to achieve full bloom.

The bone dust of a love-lost yesterday

is great manure

for fresh love.

The thing with fresh love

and volatile people is —

they fuck like wrecking balls

and grow like tornadoes.

You and I weren’t the exception.

For a change.

Someone’s wife.

Someone else’s woman.

A hard gamble to bet on.

You don’t escape it.

It comes crashing

like a house of cards.

She was the Queen.

I was the King.

He was the Joker.

After all —

this was our story to tell.

But jokers

have often changed

the course of history.

And this was still a marriage —

the ace of which

was the Joker’s to pull and push.

And he did push.

And just like that —

a burnt house found its refuge.

And the fire in our bellies

burnt us both,

as the rage in our entrails

died a mad dog’s death.

You were gone.

Clean cuts.

As if it was never there.

Back to the basics.

As if eighteen months

of cosmic corruption

was edited out

in the final audit.

Forgetting a man

outside a marriage is easy.

Call it a mistake.

An inevitable fallout

of a reckless husband's ignorance.

But forgetting a woman

in another man’s marriage —

now that’s hard.

Call it whatever you want to —

but the stench

and the stains

of your perverted intentions

stay

and

some sins

scream louder

than 

silence can bury.