here is the repeated image of a lover destroyed; any

[garbage]

Alive? he might be dead for aught I know,  With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain,  And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He overstayed his time on the mortal plane; he grew old and sway-backed, gray speckling his muzzle. When death came, he was grateful. He welcomed death, following her into the ocean, sinking down, down, down. His life had been long, and full of pain, of heartbreak, of his own failings. His own sins. He did not cling to it. He did not cherish it. He had never had that ill ideal of immortality that some swept, the unshakable belief that death would somehow pass them by. No, he’d felt the weight of the days in every aching bone. And he had died. As he was supposed to.   But there was something latent in him. He woke on the shores of the beach, a moment exchanged with a woman who looked too much like Garbage. Who looked too much like a boy – a young boy – that Garbage had once known. (I could keep you warm, he promised, and he fulfilled that promise, god help him.) And then there had been a pull, terrible and strange, and he had not though over much of it, until –   Until his ghost form burned and smoldered, until the oceans he’d walked into years ago seethed and foamed, and from their waves a crumpled, wet form was spat back on to the beach. The wretched thing rises to his knees, and it’s reminiscent, in a way, of how he kneeled in different sands, in a long-dead kingdom. He’s still black, and when he opens his eyes, they still blaze orange. But he’s younger, the years wound back. He’s handsome, if you don’t look to close. He rises to his feet, staggers. Memories swirl in his mind, a storm, and some of them are locked away in this rebirth, and what he’s left with is a sort of echo, the sense of something there but not an idea of what. Reborn, but not. Remade, but still broken.   He walks, a path he doesn’t know but his feet still recall. Back to the meadow. Back to a place he once knew so well.   Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe;  I never saw a brute I hated so;  He must be wicked to deserve such pain.