we do not write poetry
we write mirrors
which are held up
to curious faces
who read
looking for their
own reflections

nothing hurts me
like your pain

your tenebrous image enraptures me
future’s heat brands me with you
your silhouette fills my vision
but all your features are hidden

calling to me in a voice I know
but have not yet heard
a shout made a whisper
you are so many years away

always I have known you
sensed you by your absence

I chafe and fret, anxious and
expectant of your arrival
believing it imminent

eagerly I shut my eyes to
what little I know of you
trusting as only callow
youth allows that no
more is needed
than my open arms

I see you everywhere
impetuously I give my heart
only to find no synchrony
even the lineation was wrong
each time it is not you
you are still
far from me

yet I am wrenched forward
I lurch undiscerning, heedless
pressed forever into rashness
by all consuming urgency for you

endless, fruitless searching
confusion and despair
my constant companions
lost in a torrent of nothing

like one freezing
in lingering polar night
to stop is to die, helpless
I stumble towards providence

when we are young we practice love
though we know not a whit thereof

each pang we suffer our heart askew
must be certain sign of love most true

each time our heart is cut and bruised
is a lesson taught of love misused

a stern instructor of teenage years
life keeps teaching through our tears

but pain and sorrow are love’s only school
we must attend if we would learn this rule

it’s not love itself which does us wrong
but the lying tongue and deceiving song

no love gone bad is not to blame
it’s a selfish heart to which love’s a game

take my hand and don’t let go
hold God’s hand with your other
give no attention to what you hear
it is only murmurs of lies
words which are of no substance
the sounds of phantoms
they want to destroy you
to cause unbearable pain
to everyone you love
do not listen
please


do not let go with either hand
so that you cannot take
the hand of Death
when it is offered

I hinge upon you
you are the fulcrum
of all my motion

I am adrift in shadow when parted from you

existing in a non-life and a non-death
caught between dominions of light and dark

my soul, disincarnate, hangs suspended
impaled upon the sundering hook of an obscene
numinous dismembering of the essence that is Us

twisting and battered in an enervating wind which
moans and wails like the wretched, suffering ******
filling a haunted and dissonant land with anguish
at the midpoint between rivened you and I

all aspects of me are halved, dissipated
I must survive with half a feebly beating heart
inhale for but one struggling lung, choked with ash
seeing only half the sky, half the world

My scattered thoughts incomplete and disordered
I drag myself, mauled and maimed, towards
the next transcendent moment of palpability in Us

Khronos, laughing, mocks all my efforts
drags the hours just beyond my numb fingers

I can only touch you if I reach inside of me