Not yet you’re not
Not so long as I’m on watch
Night a feathered swatch of cloth
Wrapping the moon in its afterwards
I, a slice of light against longing dark
Watching you dream away your final hours
It is hard sometimes to be filled with conscience
Pins like stinging bees, nimble, silvered barbs
Attack the calm
It felt so long ago then, in the sterile room
Rendered fantastical by ebbing, weakening gloom
All laid bare, your deceptive heart and my foolishness
Still I stayed, for no reason aside mad love
And love is false, love is a sword, a knife, a tombstone
Love has no expiry, still you turned, still you turned
And in your sleep I found the truth in the lie
For nothing is whole if you are broken
I wander sometimes down that ghosted corridor
When days are heat stricken and I am sickening
To find some solace to your disintegration
Did you know, when you turned to salt for looking back?
I watched over you even as you broke every promise
Not because I am good, I have never been good to myself
But when we are hurting so, wishing so, that someone should
Shelter us from further harm, sometimes we return to the burn
And knowing it well, and knowing it well
Lend ourselves to repeated flay, for love is not always gentle or sensible
You who let me break myself, sleep now, lifeless in sepia
No amount of time can wring the responsibility gone
No funeral will bury the loss, it scatters as rain threatens
All who fear storms close their doors tight while I
Write the verbs in wet soil, hoping tomorrow they’ll be blurred
It is
Why I sit unmoving, you see
Life prepares eternal for dying
Some of us
Simply sit closer to the end
Where, if you crane your neck
From your window in the hospital
You’ll see us starting over somewhere
And burying the dead with first sun
Like that ring you lost and forgot about
When portends were just superstition
And memories meant to be folded and lost
Even as in ridding all, you threw away my years too
Never to be retrieved
Somewhere they haunt my periphery
Like all agony, shiny with scar tissue
Will appear to be skin still
Though it has no way to hold together, no means of
Repair.
Okay, this tore all through me:
“When portends were just superstition
And memories meant to be folded and lost
Even as in ridding all, you threw away my years too
Never to be retrieved
Somewhere they haunt my periphery
Like all agony, shiny with scar tissue
Will appear to be skin still
Though it has no way to hold together, no means of
Repair.”
This is exceptional and painful to read. Such an incredible piece of writing.
For all of us who stayed when we should have run, who imagined to hold together something broken (or, never actually whole?) beyond repair.
Such heartfelt anguish
Love it Candice
Lovely. I see you are still writing your beautiful, thought-provoking poetry. Love it, Deb 💜
I like your line – for all of us who stayed when we should have run – that absolutely absolutely nails it
My Friend. When I read a comment like this of yours, it fills me with renewal and hope. I have submitted less because rejection may not be personal but it’s still hard and I write less because I seem to find no time to write with all the work (although that is of course, an excuse) and I find time slipping past and I have no fervor for it – so your words – they hold me together in ways I cannot describe but am so very, very grateful for.
🙏🏾💜