“You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.”- George Mikes

This is my “Sestina on Crack”. I varied the Sestina form to give it even more repetition. The form looks like this:
1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3
3, 1, 2, 2, 1, 4
4, 3, 1, 1, 2, 5
5, 4, 2, 3, 1, 6
6, 5, 1, 4, 3, 2
2, 6, 3, 5, 4, 1

Influence: Selections by The Angry String Quartet

Expressive

Fathomless expressions, too trembling to manage,
puddled on the floor between us. So much
I left, besides my coat, wrinkled and stained.
These few soft moments before you manage
to make me nervous. I wanted to make as much
of my myself real as each and every stain.

From passing desire and suffering looks I abstained.
Now guilt wrenched my calm away. I managed
to keep my love locked with secrets, where much
of me is kept. But I allowed time too much
passage. Before the last autumn leaf managed
to fall…  still not enough. You were already gone.

Brightest bits of laughter, tender tellings gone
to rest. Your face framed by sunlight’s stains
never to return. Most thoughts you left unmanaged.
My heart still beats untamed, managed
by despair alone. When sorrow tears too much
into the last hours of day. Leaving nothing.

Fabric of sanity shredded, forsaken by a “no.” Things
littered on my floor and mind when everyone’s gone,
Still stink of you. I howled into the hollows, too much
faded away in a trickle of days. Old, drying stains,
the only remains of simple regrets. Still I manage
to breath in and out. How do I reach the place to cross?

Amnesia, a drug I long to sip. But I’d travel across
paths of stone or fire for one last minute to say nothing
at all; just touch your hand. None of my dreams manage
to convey the essence of your eyes. Dead and gone
I’d rather, than haunted and alone, merely a stain
on someone else’s floor. No more, or much.

But even with a terrible ache and pain of so much
Imagination, I still know what you said. No cross
too heavy; no truth without passion, sweat and stains.
One life or all the world, who weighs the last? Nothing
else gets me through each day. So I wait. My soul gone
another day, not today. Somehow I still manage.