it's pain
missing someone you know
you can never see again
but it's a special kind of torture
to miss the man sitting right
next to me

has he left yet?
an imminent departure that
looms ominously in the future
concrete and yet nebulous in
its heat-wrenching reality
but am i not already gone
departed from this bag of bones
the sack of flesh
that holds your hand
physically next to you but
miles away
lost
in the shadow world of
haze and fog
detached so that you can't
be ripped from my heart
or at least
i won't be able to feel it
like a ghost reaching for the
tenuous solidity of life

you slip right through my fingers
the last drops of water
in the barren wasteland of
famine and drought
sun scorched earth
desert land parched with
cracks running like
fault lines
and i'm waiting for the earthquake
the meteor impact
for a chasm to open up and
devour me
to take away my agency
so i won't have to die
by my own hand

but what else am i to do?

i am a rapidly swirling
hurricane
a typhoon of uncontrollable
emotion and thoughts
chained to the white matter
tethered to my brain
scratching away as a constant
reminder that you're leaving
and i'll once more be
abandoned
alone
nothing

but loneliness is a familiar friend

am i a monster?
or just a machine
trundling towards the
end of the tracks
the derailment of my
tenuous sanity
and i welcome the carnage
the shards of glass and
twisted metal that
harkens back to the
burdening truth inside that
i'm still here and the
pain is unbearable

and i'm broken
like a swallow's shattered wing
i try to fly but
that gelatinous appendage
can't bear me to the sky
so i fall and pass you
on the way down
and i never expected you to catch
me

you didn't

but your face
that blur registering only
as that unmistakeable longing
that soul crushing emotion that
settles in my heart and
clogs the arteries until
its furious beats are choked out
but i welcome death
because i live in those
tenuous moments between
the last heartbeat
and the cessation of neural firings

i'm drowning

i can't keep my head above water
but the burning in my lungs
can't distract me from
that ripping clawing terror
in my chest
and not even death can
erase the gaping
empty
vacuum
you leave in your wake.