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…