For days I followed
your looming shadow
stark and black
towards that shining hill,

Used me like a ladder,
climbing to that point,
as I stood below you,
silent and still.

I let you use
all of my limbs,
my body and mind,
torn and bruised

You tore away
my nerves and bits
always expendable
in your use.

You had a heart,
a cryptic mind,
my hero guiding
with his touch,

Who had a side,
of flint and still,
so dark and scary,
that I knew such.

But I never knew
what you were doing
if you asked or you stole
everything in between

As you looked past
that stormy hill
and left everything
that you've always been.

The emptiness rests within me, flowing through my veins and my bones, solidifying the feeling of one-ness that resides within me alone. How do I stop this feeling? How do I stop this un-feeling?

I do not know the answer.  It is unattainable, far beyond the scope of my state of mind. I understand not what makes me starve through the night; what makes my lips ache and crack; what makes me sleep through the day; what makes me lie awake when all I want is to die.

If I am a tapestry, a threaded piece, then all I want to do is to tear my nerve-endings apart, perhaps slowly--or quickly, whichever it may be. I want to pluck every thread and slowly pull myself into mere shreds of who I am until nothing is left. And I want to permeate, like water evaporating through the atmosphere.

Unseen by the naked eye.

Maybe then, when I join the very air I breathe, I will know what it feels like to become something.

To simply belong.

The sour of the metal spoon
clings to the roof of my mouth.
My eyes water, lips pucker,
as my hands tremble underneath
the low light of the humid room.

The movement of time grates on
my frozen nerves, thrumming
within heated flesh. Death sits across
from where I am, as I feast upon the
offering that life gives.

The food is cold. It is ash in my mouth.
For I have stuck to the same food for so long, I have found, I am not content
with the serving I have chosen. But Death waits patiently, in his alcove
of mystery.

It is time, and I know.

I dine with death, with spoon and fork in hand, and this is the food I have chosen.

This is the life I have lived. My choice that I ponder, and we concede. It doesn't matter what food we eat, with what we eat, and how we eat it. But by the end, I know.

I have chosen something terrible, and Death will hold me by the hand alone, as we leave, side by side, to the door outside.

Here, I face towards the indiscriminate darkness, and before I say I am nothing, I say, "I am one".

And so, how are we to move on from a love we desperately hold on to?

The beast rolls around the corner,
its head rearing, taunting and playing
the piano keys like Beethoven on his last hurrah,
proudly smothering my chest with an ache,
an emptiness.

"Only between us," you say, a glance my way,
a reassurance, with a cloying smile. My heart tightens,
"No," I was about to answer, but my thoughts move,
the dictionary in my head turning "no" into a, "Yes, of course".
Turning my truth into a lie,
my heart the severing line.

Giving my frown the definition of a smile.

Beethoven still plays the piano in my mind,
playing his wonderful concertos and sonatas,
this deaf man.
And you can call me friend, your comrade,
your companion, in that less of a jumbled dictionary of yours,
filled with dog-eared pages and highlighted words.

"You matter to me," I say with every ounce of conviction.

You can hear me, but unlike Beethoven you never make a sound.

And I am the broken recorder, testing my conviction.

But as Beethoven is deaf,
in this mental dictionary of mine,
filled with contradiction,
you are the only word
whose definition is friend and foe,
both one and the same.
Too near to the line to be different.

And the strange thing perhaps,
is that it has never changed.