What once was a smile
Has faded to pain
With wrinkles and lines
And clouds filled with rain

Wishing our lives
had been so much more
Than pain and regret
And walking the floor

Now loneliness fills
every room and hall
With echoes of goodbyes
that shadow the walls

Not looking back
To what once was okay
Now with a focus
Of turning away

We dare not speak
Lest it should finally end
Trying to salvage
What might have been

Nothing
I tried as best i could
to call forth
even the vague whisper of a memory

(like words that only reach the
back of your tongue,
a phantom thought
teetering
on the tip of remembrance
above the abyss of
a deeply buried past)

but even those shadows seemed to hide
in the deepest recesses of my subconscious;
teasing thoughts
that played with my conception
of reality
saunter no more
about this playground,
the landscape for my most wild
and torrid fantasies:
my imagination.

For it seems,
without the light touch
of times past,
this darkness,
that i feel
must have resided in me
since the beginning of time,
would never again lift
its heavy shroud
upon my soul
for the much needed
moments of peace this allowed me.

Despair permeated each particle of air I inhaled,
for who am I
if the whole of me
remains intact
only in the scattered minds
of those whose faces
no longer inhabit my dreams?

Truly, I believe the nightmares of this paranoid mind
have succumbed to reality


                                                       ­ for i fear I have, at last, become nothing,

The train conductor ***** the horn quietly, to not awaken the babies
a mother next door has cried over for weeks--
A response team arrived twenty minutes after gas crept from the walls in satiated exultation--
Our sky wishes to be alone tonight--
It turns out the water heater was inexperienced and quit.

Grey waves creeping in—
White ley, washed stones, twisted wood,
  .  .  .  Bones of whale and tree.

I cling onto each note,
each word like a life support system,
and I'm on the decline.
Thanks for paying the hospital bill with
the song,
the words,
the notes
you left behind for me to live off.