In response to grundoon's challenge of February 10, 2004. Belated.

  Another love. I am weary of the starts
of things. He did the best he could, consumed
with love or pain or both; I will not cry.
  Tea over rice. The stillness of an empty room.

  I will permit my memory to recall
one of a million ways to feel no pain.
  For richer and for partly severed head:
O blind cupidity, O wrath insane!

  Among familiar things grown strange to me —
only exactly as strange as everything else,
you said. You kissed me. It was sweet and timid.
  No one will ever love you for your honesty.

  Ready for sleep, but lacking dreams. I am
the child with her nose pressed up against the window.

With apologies mostly to junkpile and graceness for bastardised nodeshells, and to any gods of verse for sacrificing rhyme to metre. (The challenge stands, should you wish to do better; I have a stack of unused nodeshells to contribute to any effort.)