Requiem Remembered from Recent Conversation

My hair, now long and tangled
fell barely past my chin then
that day when we first met
and I sit tonight on a cold floor
in a house that's familiarly hateful
cigarette after cigarette burns unnoticed
between my fingers
because I can feel yours
twisting strands of that long-ago hair
in a mindless and heartbreaking rhythm
and I remember
that spring and summer
of my thirtieth year
you saved the strands you found
in vehicles and hairbrushes
on cushions and pillows and floors
while I staunchly kept the distance
safe enough for both of us
to protect the "us" from what
we would inevitably become
still, today, terrified of becoming
knowing that intimacy plus proximity
is an equation
with only one possible sum
the sum, for "us," unthinkable
and the armory against it necessary
for once exposed to reality, the "us"
composed previously of light and darkness only
must become the "us" of
dishes and dirty laundry
socks on the floor and seats left up
and have to, need to, can't you just
be QUIET...
and when you twirl my hair now
the strands that fall are silver and gold
and unnoticed and unsaved
and the "us" that I protected so fiercely
from the light and darkness of its own being
is stunted and malformed, and grows
only more misshapen with time
and I, in sorrow, weep in my corner
for the inadvertant murder of "us"
twirling and twisting my long tangles
in a mindless and heartbreaking rhythm
to which my memory dances
with the spectre of the dead.