Beauty In The Burden

Happy birthday in heaven

Another year gone by

As I recount the sentiments

Residual reminders of every year I said goodbye

5 years since you died

Countless are the tears I’ve cried

I hold onto every memory and dwell on you in passing

Knowing you now reside in a place of joy and healing everlasting

Nevertheless I still am captive in this life that is a void

When sight is darkness I’m blinded by the illusion of the absence

Today would’ve been your 68th,

I try to slow down and take into account another thought

When accepting feels like letting go and guilty to think that I forgot

Yet still knowing moving on is okay and what you’d want

My dreams fewer and far between

A part of me longs for my mind to imagine your apparition’s silhouette

Longing for every memory to taunt

To remind me of a place of things unseen

As I exist inside this realm of shadows, this dementia world, and all that time forgets

I’m left here, moment to moment, as I can’t help but relive regret

All the joys of who you were, and my conscience broken for its debt

Robbed it feels, when I think of how you should still be here

Losing my grip on the reality of you as I learn to tolerate death

Tragedy like clockwork, desensitized to all I used to fear

Our reunion exists on the other side of my last breath

Until then I wait and commemorate as I remember

As every memory harbors the fragrance of roses blooming in December

Letters written to keep these thoughts alive

When it becomes a bond of journals and well said sadness

As I go through the motions of just trying to survive

Enchantments reinvented for affections set on madness

I toss and turn, torn between peace of mind and the hearts unrest

When even as my faith is a gift so by suffering I am blessed

When I would never trade a day or a moment to relinquish the ache

This love is worth the pain of loss as I hold onto the burden of heartbreak…

Invisible Light

Bearing the weight

Another day

Another moment of loss

Grief speaks in the silence

When joys feel as a set up for sorrow

Carried away, lost for yesterday

How do I face tomorrow

Absence the presence, the haunting

Parched by memory, thirsty, unquenchable wanting

Significant moments of annual appreciation

As I celebrate her heart, a love like no other

Inadequate sentiments versed to honor the life of my mother

Can you hear me on the other side?

Is my life a reflection that attests to your virtue?

When I’m so aware of all the ways that I’ve failed

The ways that I hurt you

Knowing yet all that exists in your heart and mind

Is the poetry you made of me stanzas of lifeline

When you only ever saw me after the pattern of what I did right

Your love an echo that lives on in me in the guidance of an invisible light

I live on as I waver between nights of day and days of night

In the comfort and heaviness of the will to endure

When every breath burns in my lungs in high definition emotions when dreams are a blur

The ache lingers on but if this ache is the only bond I have left, I don’t want the cure

Tethered to heaven, heart strings like umbilical cords pulsing rebirth

When this world is the gates of hell, every thought of you is beautiful suffering transcending the earth

You are the joy set before me despite the present pain

As you bloom in my heart where your legacy grows overcast skies resurrect me in rain

Whether comfort or the illusion of the sting

It all stands as a reminder that I’m still alive

As you live on inside of me

I learn from your heart still beating in me, what it means to thrive

Continuing on in the clock work of routine

I stop for a moment to calibrate and become who you raised me to be

I know you’re still alive somewhere unseen

Interceding in heaven, never giving up on me

Happy Mother’s Day, thankful for who you were and still are

As I think of you I’m reminded a part of you still lives in me and you’re not so far…

A Part of Me Has Died With You

Five years today
Like a milestone of underlying sadness
The tide rolls in and I’m caught in the waves
Pulled beneath the undertow
When the absence is the new norm

The tears fade and you become a whisper in the peripherals of a world that moves on without you

But you are still a scream to me that echoes in the silence of undying memory

Lost in a recurring nightmare, I close my eyes again
I dream of you and wake to the loss
My mind caught in a loop that seeks to deny the reality I face everyday

When it’s become all too common, I learn to cope with this
Time is not a miracle worker
I cannot find healing here, I just learn to tolerate bleeding

Thoughts seep like blood from scars that reopen beneath the surface
I try to speak to utter the vibrance of the beauty that is you
But my words are colorless in the expression of what pales in an aim to convey your essence

Why aren’t you here?
My heart haunted by unanswered questions like a suspect on trial
Interrogations of the mystery of what fails to add up
When every answer fails to suffice the longing

While I pretend to rejoice at the thought of a place after this one
But here and now all I feel is the theft of a present moment like the winds knocked out of my lungs and you are a breath that I can’t catch
A part of me has died with you

Count up to count downs, when age is life in decay
Further from the you in the past
Closer to the end that marks a parallel existence
I remind myself that we will meet again on the other side of this
Yet even so the comforts of a thought hardly sates the thirst for your presence that won’t be quenched this side of heaven

So I write these letters I send across the void like a message in a transcendent bottle of prayers

In this catharsis of poetry I scrapbook a patchwork of words to dress my vulnerability in the adornment of the will to endear

Making sweet of the bitter in the thought that my love speaks beyond the grave that my heart might catch your ear

Echoing the resonance, digging up the depths of all I miss
Remembering you as I hold on to both the joys and the heartache of the ways I reminisce…

Parallel Gardens

Echoing the heavy utterance
A never ending heartache
Temporal and fleeting joys
Overcome by the repetitions of sorrow

Yesterday is gone, the moment is an illusion
Lost on this side of eternity for the longing of tomorrow

Tomorrow never comes they say
Every second in the age of passing
Will love carry us through the veil of death
To the life found in the realms of something everlasting

Lost for all our hopes vested in the divine
Hanging by a thread of faith to write us past the ending
To a place outside of time
Letters in the form of prayers spoken in the silence transcending

Ebbing and flowing, walking across the depths
Sinking ever further when absence is the stench of death

This valley is but a shadow of what is yet to come
Holding on to better place condolences, yet here and now I am undone

When life is overcast of sadness
The night feels like forever
Every day is darkness when I cannot see the sun

Finding a way to breathe, suffocated by the madness
Another season of this stormy weather
Confined by a lifetime, there is nowhere to hide and nowhere to run

Safety in the mystery
For all the questions that I have
Some are better left unanswered by the reason of a man
Interrogating the Healer
Yearning to try and understand

In this present darkness every heart on trial
Eyes swollen with bitter tears sting as they trail down
When days like these prove the fraudulence of a smile
The precipitation of our clouded vision cascading to the ground

Inverted roses with roots made of daisies
Planting parallel gardens
Every grave the bedrock of rebirth
When every loved one that we bury finds us conflicted by brokenness and liberation from the earth

Blooming on opposite sides of what pails to be put into perspective
When all we feel is the weight of another loss
When mortality finds that death is freedom, survival is my cross

Waking up without you here finds a part of me has died too
Because I’ve never known a world until now that I’ve had to bear the loss of you…

Illnesses of Mass Destruction

Face to face with life
Am I the blessing or the curse
Weary in the valley
Lost for the temporal beauty of the shadow
Trying to find the words to say it all
Make sense of it and find my peace again

I write letters in a perpetual state of transition
Shouting into the void, the echoes of anguish and hopes that fluctuate between confidence and question
Caught in the in between
Trying to find a sense of home in a world that I don’t belong

Hungry is my exile heart, banished by sabotaged and betrayed affections
As I oscillate between the nature of who I’ve been and who I am

Stones throw away from monsters in our mirrors that stare back at us through the lens of divided perspectives
When one moment I seek to imitate Christ but the next it’s as if my life more truly immolates the notion
What would Judas Do?

When I feel like I’m traitor to my own legacy for bloodlines in collision
My veins weaved together and entwined
When my mother was a warrior but I bear the burden of my fathers frame of mind
As scars become the fingerprints of how we define ourselves
Suffering for heavens sake in the face of our present hells

There are no innocent victims and we’ve all got blood on our hands
Yet still we orbit in our contemplation
All that we endure as if entitled to grace when we deserve damnation

Humility entreats me as I reconcile
I’ve no vision for true justice for the ways my eyes have been defiled
When I began found but started to lose my way when I was just a child
Am I not still the offspring of God, yet molested by this world
Touched by demons, the devil is a pedophile

Kill, steal, and destroy
Weapons forged of illness
Thievery of hearts by way of failing love
This hand me down devastation

I speak heavy handed hallelujahs to salvage what is left of all that has been taken
When the one person I loved the most was healed by way of death but in the vapor I felt as if she was forsaken

When faith is poisoned by a broken meditation
I go in circles in my mind yearning to resolve this theological frustration

When doubts are fears in infancy and I cannot come up with an answer
My sorrow nurses on the sour milk of loss at the hand of the breast cancer

I remember it like yesterday when it went into remission
Then returned, on the eve of new beginnings, inside her head
As gradually life left her eyes and blurred her hopes vision
My faith was robbed by the heartache that broke me in every word the doctor said

A prognosis of three months but in two she passed away
I replay the order of events inside my mind, knowing I should rejoice at the thought of her in heaven, but I just can’t today

Appealing to God and asking why
As if to put divinity on trial according to my finite point of view
I know that you are in a better place but sometimes I feel lost here without you

Feeling my way around in the darkness of my own ways that fail to align
As I sing the name of Jesus on Sunday but journal my despair in double entendre confessions of every poetic and ugly line

Bearing my heart I bleed in honesty not for some spectacle marvel at a way with words
But to mourn with those who mourn and be vulnerable as I find a way to cure imperfect faith through the chemotherapy of truth
When depression like tumors symptomatic of the ways I medicate with lust perpetuates this cancer of my youth

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll see you again
When the accuser makes his case against me to prosecute me on the premise of my sin
I just learn to trust in God, even when I don’t understand
Such love that covers over multitudes of words and sins
All for just a man…

Consolation

Capturing the digital echo
Resounding at will
Our faces sing inside a web of catacombs

All that’s left is the shell
When life is drank like nectar from the dried up wells of undead memory

I live and suffer the beauty
Waking up in the dream of you that I can’t keep
Every morning another lamentation
Every night I bring you back to life when I close my eyes

Slumbering for visitation rights between this present hell and heavenly getaways
Like portals of transcendence behind my eyelids

Smother me with affections in my sleep
Till I wake up catching a breath I sometimes wish would escape me

Resurrection, bring back the vibrancy of daylight despite an overcast perspective
When all that’s left of the storm is the torrential downpour of the trauma

Rain is the illusion of devastation when every drop is but the catalyst of vegetation
When gravity is the soil I push through to sprout my wings and learn to fly again

What is every blessing in this moment but consolation prizes like glimmers of hope that are the evidence of eternity

Nothing here is the destination
Waiting for the end of the vapor
Author of my faith, life is labor
My story speaks beyond the pages
Digging deeper on every sheet of paper…

The Poetry Won’t Bring You Back

Pouring over these former letters
Reactivating the potency of my emotions
How do I keep the memory of you alive
What good is it to look in rearview

I can’t help but reminisce again
When every word is a snapshot from my heart
Writing to commemorate, honor, and ache for you

Another letter, another year, another moment I feel the lack
So many words to express my love
Yet no matter what I say, the poetry won’t bring you back

Speaking like floral arrangements at the grave of another memory
When there’s so much I wish you could be here to see
I feel I don’t do justice your legacy
As I look into the broken mirror reflecting all the shards of me

Videos harbor the essence of your grace
Yet even still aren’t enough to act as a substitute for your embrace

Yearning once more to see you face to face
Out of reach yet still I run to match your pace

Trying to keep up with the way you ran the race
It’s been four years and without you here, I still feel out of place

Belonging versus absence
There are parts of me that have passed away
When you are a light extinguished
I exist here in the night of another day

A question still echoes like whispers in my head
As to where I’ll end up in eternity
Will I see you again or am I spiritually dead
When I know all too well the weight of my hypocrisy

As I doubt the best for the worst in me
Yet I hope in my will to continue on
Because when I think of you I have confidence in my identity
I can still hear your voice even though you’re gone

If I knew then what I know now, in the hindsight journals of 2020 reflected
All the phone calls I might’ve made, all I wish I had or hadn’t spoken

Our bonds I feel in some way I neglected
Some days I feel like I’m okay but others I’m still broken

Holding on as I savor the memory of everything you are
When I think of you, I think of heaven, and it doesn’t feel so far…