Putting a shift in

Today's prompt was a lengthy and complicated process, with a set of instructions to follow. The end result could probably do with some major editing and tweaking, but I'm 

reasonably happy. I think it could be alright with a bit of work but here it is, warts-and-all:

Au revoir

A handful of glances becomes an uncomfortable stare

and he is so sorry, he begs your pardon 

but he cannot take his eyes off the girl in the clouds

for fear she might fuse into the atmosphere

He has seen loss and it looks like a hole in the dirt

hard to exhume and harder to fill with a broken back.

When you come down, I will never feel or love again.

and it will surely please you when I bite my pillow

every night. We will each ask no questions and tell no lies.

It can't be a coincidence it rained the day you left me. Well,

maybe it didn't rain but the sky seemed low and saturated

with the muggy, liquid sunshine of regret.

Every morning that bird shrugs at me through circled glass

mumbling don't look at me, I've no idea either

and when you waved goodbye, I might have said well,

I go to the foot of my grandfather's stairs 

because I think it was the right moment, but

in the event I said nothing and you said nothing.

I forgot to tell you about the time years ago when

I heard that awful woman shriek carpe diem! at a child

in Matalan of all places, and only you would understand

quite how strange that was. Too late to wish you were there.

The words falling from your mouth tasted bitter and sickly

because they had the shameful, piercing ring of truth

and if I felt your fingers it was only the touch of madness

that fogs things up and makes me reel like a thoughtless child

plummeting, head-first, to the wrong conclusion.

and if I prostrate myself, or become Brutus it is only because

I see you deified by children, adventuring souls whom

I might be moved to love and never speak of it

and if I said I breathed-in the pages of my old book

to detect a trace of you, would you take me literally

or simply understand that I miss you, that's all.

If your sadness is a grey, troubled pond in a squall

then I am the pitiful fish caught in its undercurrent

You can only do so much laissez-faire thinking.

I am utterly convinced that you are probably not

several different people with different voices and

thoughts and feelings, working irregular shift patterns

but if I called you a doyle you wouldn't understand anyway.

I am a parasite, sucking scanty joy from your veins

and wondering why I'm starving and you are lifeless.

After a once upon there was a long emptiness

because she left me in no man's land, a sort-of

lonely buffer zone with checkpoints and guardposts

and I didn't even realise 'til you knocked the wall down

so I will soak up the inevitable deluge and wait

until your thoughts break through the clouds again.