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…