People leave
First lesson you ever learned

Second lesson was: They leave and keep on forfeiting

You’ve been gone too long and they have forgotten you

Your people, your former tribe, where you came from

Now it seems so long ago, another version of you, dislocated

Unfamiliar in your punched out center, wrought with black rose

You wish you could forget
But ever ready hurt blooms at night, perfuming loss with her heavy hands

You are told you are losing your sight
Someone reminds you that you can learn braille

You want to tell them to fuck off
You want to fuck off with them and not be you
The one who is going moon blind

It was too much a very long time ago

Now it’s indescribable, that cecity, that indistinction, how edges

lose focus; you dip your dissolving fingers into the caliginous

and stay and stay and stay

Maybe only the belief you may die before it all begins rolling down hill

An odd insensate longing to live

Despite nothing but the saturnine skin on your back

Cold against a dark breaded chill
Maybe the imagined beach at night and the fancied freedom that doesn’t exist

Like chasing the dragon and hoping, in that disconsolate smoke

You will find somewhere else, far from sentencing and early mornings

Dripping with a specific brand of despair you know as your reflection

Take your eye off the stygian shackles
Try not to need love
Try not to have dreams

When they break you, it just hurts twice as bad

Besotted with gentling folly

Now you understand why they took their lives at 27.