We are creatures made ill;
by the decision to remember or forget our many exhausted selves,
Those familiar faces
Worn from the weight of self birth.
I do often see
See sight of familiar eyes ….
A memory fresh in your palms
Appearing most often at night,
When the barriers to duality falter and
momentarily, our hearts align.
Most likely it is just the pulsing of flesh that feels to us like presence.
So young to have the misfortune of a rot.
A sepsis caught from the spit of the past,
Asked falsely back by laments,
Cast into your own ether at self expense.
Hence, it appears worthy of thanks,
that the one with whom I shared a skull no longer gives me fear.
Anxiety, sheer dried flesh that brought me close to death,
For years, I have not tasted her iron on my breath.
Retrospective thanks, perhaps, that bring a memory back?
Easy. Wonder, where that shade hides,
For it’s true — we grow and shed, but keep our baby eyes.
I didn’t perform my own last rites,
So then perhaps it is my own shadow, cast by two lights.
It’s important, not to forget to worry.
Worry of your own mimesis, flesh imitation
Poetry’s invitation, in this developing obituary,
with each memory dragged from stale dirt with wary hands,
Serving to marry that past and present —
The act of burying that younger girl I cannot see —
Forming a shadow of its own, and killing my Eurydice!
I know the danger of Calliope’s hyperbole.
How worthy I am now, of love and life.
Tangible hours, warm and empty nights,
dripped in February sun, October ice.
Fresh and scented air.
Now these days, they pass with eloquence,
Joy exists, and this is evidence.
What’s strong in me, force that fills my once cold thighs and stomach,
Fruit and wine, yes — but most of all, the years of age gained living with death as a child.
Exiled from my own body, only to return old, but carrying the capacity,
the ability to be unrelentingly happy.
There are some things you never gain again after being lost.
Innocence — those snowdrops don't return after a frost.
Innocence, something I'm not sure I wanted anyway.
Unlike Orpheus, my dead Eurydice had a single life.
My glance is as his, far from pulling her from the Underworld,
That old and broken lover is kept inside by hindsight.
But I offer to the Underworld, that blinding grey I now have so happily forgot,
That blinding grey haunted, I imagine, by the shade I share a name with,
This final lament to the lost years.
I know now to not flee fears that surround my own myth.
A confession and a celebration, my own libation —
dedicated to a prayer that they stay dead, forever.