I heard you were married and then
left behind and you were afflicted
and I never got to say I’m sorry-
never got to tell you about
the black echo, then floods of light
that all calls to the heart.
Never got to tell you the message
I should have when I did not answer
and pretended to be unafflicted:
you don’t dust it all off like cat hair-
it is the door you leave through.
Eventually, dusting off, the emptiness of eyes,
the time gathering in between the pages of books-
where had they gone, those mornings of smoke
and flower petals and fool’s gold? Why is it now
just choking and tiny wounds, turning white?
I can’t see them. I should be able to, I’ve known enough.
The door is broken. The alarm is ringing.
The wound from the old loneliness is one black hole
pooling my introverted silence into the floor,
a collection of stupid words and jumbled reveries.
Suddenly I’m on an edge and I can’t breathe.
Fear like that burns and folds into the clouds
until the even sky looks wrong. But still, I can’t do it-
I can’t bury every day as though somehow
my hands have become portals to places where
I was another me and I never had nightmares,
and to places where time to today didn’t happen,
not as I saw it through eyes wide and a halo of gold
sometimes, then sometimes through the shadows
carried by the hauntings. I started over once,
when my mind fell apart and when I pulled back the veil,
saw for the first time that I did not exist without it.
I started over but I do hold the memories in my luggage,
making my weak backbone buckle, but hauled up
on genuine shoulders. The kind you can cry and laugh on.
I can breathe now. Something as simple as speaking
has made me brave, and I am not broken, not today.
