When you were born, I held you in my hands.
When you died, my hands brushed you face and raised the sheet that served as your shroud in that oddly quiet and sterile room.
I always had such a way with living things: people, pets, plants, words.
Everything I touch now seems to dry up and wither away, since you have gone.
Yet somehow, I have not succumbed to failure to thrive.
Why?
Piling up. Time.
Hours, minutes, seconds split into fifths.
The days folding neatly into each other.
The ragged edges only appear at night, when I go to bed and your voice does not track softly behind me to say goodnight.
The leaves are turning, like the world. Without you. Me with you.
Standing at the top of hills, at top of stairs, on balconies, I wonder.
Wonder if you will catch me if I willingly fall.
Will you ghostly arms cradle my soul, as I my body loses the fight against the hard surface?
Or will I wake, even more broken, dragging my ruined body like a dog left to side by the side of an abandoned road?
Bits and pieces of the flotsam of the universe after all; walking, talking, living, dying.
How does the my world function without you?
But then again, why would it not?
The Teacher spoke and you appeared. For me.
Like skin attached to muscles, connected by sinew and enlivened by nerves, you were to me. And I to you.
For it is so plain.
Let the wise among us hear. See these truths.
*
Feed me. I hungered and you gave me food for my body and fed my heart.
Without you I am wasting away, one molecule at a time.
Slipping back to the Great Darkness where I slumbered before I was sang into the Light.
You were in the Darkness, so I was not in fear. Only unaware yet always safe.
*
Quench my thirst. I was parched, fevered and you gave me water. Your tears of concern refreshed my soul, for I knew you would split your last drop of water in half so that neither of us would have to suffer discomfort.
Yet there is no one like you, no one to hear my cries in the night and rush to me. No one to put the cool rim of the glass to my lips.
A cool loving hand to my burning brow.
*
Shelter me. I was wandering and weary, and you opened the door, lit the room. Wrapped a warm blanket around me, showered me with words and knocked the ice of fear off my mind.
Who will make sure I have a warm place to sleep? Only you would give up your bed, allowing me to take the place where your body heated the sheets.
You would watch over me until I was firmly encased in a restful, quiet sleep.
*
Visit me. When I was in a prison of confusion, you faithfully visited me. Day after day until the bars bent and the door swung open.
I have no visitors now. Chained in a dank corner, watching listlessly as the light throws the pattern of day, noon, night on the cold floor.
I wait for your footfalls but I know that I will not hear yours or any other.
No matter, for only you held the key to the doors of this cell.
*
Days turn into nights. Time is like oil on the floor, I slip across it, blind.
You were my eyes, my ears. My loving smiling metronome.
What is time, if it exists with you?
He told me that it would break your heart if I came to you, prematurely, ahead of schedule.
He is right; if you were there. But you are not.
The sweet soft eternal darkness. Not filled with honey-coated dreams nor terror, sight and sound.
If there was more, you would have come and told me.
You loved me–you would have come for me, if you were neither destroyed or transmuted. You would have saw me crying and told me not to weep, for we were leaving together. I would not need anything, for your heart held everything for the journey.
You would not have left me cold on the floor, barely able to stand or speak because my grief turned into physical knives and nearly broke my mind.
You would not stay away. You would not leave a sign. You would not hold back on giving me the date when I am to join you and the great mass of the departed.
You are gone. How terrifying is the thought of the last time I saw you-cold, silent-is the last time I will truly see you.
For when I close my eyes for the last time, I will not see or be seen, either.
I had you.
But I do not anymore.
Either I live with it. Or die from it.
Fame has a cost; paid in blood, time and life.
~
I hoped you would come to my door, one day. I would be so lucky to get a visit from you, as your name was on the letters we received in the mail. I was too young to order the magazines but I pestered my Mom, anyway.
I knew I would not be a star but in my fantasy, I would have been announced by you, as I got to sit in on that infamous sofa.
With your big, infectious joyful voice, I bet every kid that met you on the telethon felt better, if only for a short time.
I hear you had a way of making people feel welcomed.
~~~
How could you be so lovely, causing kids in their teens and men from 20 to 80 to love you so? An Angel, grabbing the most eligible bachelors of the day.
Were you ever scared of your power over men, over people?
Did you see yourself as you were, in the hearts of those who adored you? Or did the false and merciless reflections in the mirrors held up to your face, dictate your eyes to what should be?
Those are questions that won’t be answered. But you never lost your true essence to my eyes.
~~~
What chance did you have, a tender babe of four that began doing work that adults had only begun.
Eleven years old when you fronted a band, the formal solidification of your isolation.
What did you know of love, lust and desire when you covered this? A song of adult love, filtered through your young lips.
And you retreated into a world of make-believe. In that false world, you were not cared for, your illnesses not treated.
Did you wonder what it would like to go to the store alone? To walk in a public park and not be mauled. To be normal.
Your talent still stuns me, as you did things others did not and you changed the entertainment game.
I will remember you like this, with your family, joy and happiness still on your face.
This morning, I stood mute and frozen, all around me, mouths opened and poured forth the hymn. The one from your final service.
My eyes were rooted to one spot, slowly filling with frozen water that could not fall.
Inhaling, I smelled the flowers that sat on my mantel, withering slowly, returning to the Earth, as you did. As we all will.
In that room, someone took comfort from those words that only stab me in the base of my brain. Over and over, with each refrain, the sharp blade lifts out and then go right back in. The hole is no wider or deeper-it hurts just the same.
I carry your voice in my heart, and the sounds of the laughter of those who left us. Until the us become a solitary I.
I drag the songs of the dead behind me.
Follow the trail I leave.
It leads to my grave.
Your shirt still hangs in the bathroom. I cannot remove it, only brush my fingers over the smooth woven cotton as I enter and leave the tub. Look at it, as I brush my teeth. Turn the light out and walk away.
Paused, hand on the frame. Watching it sway very gently in the breeze.
I want to leave it there. I want you to open the door and change into it, before you ask me for dinner.
You are gone. Leaving on reflections hanging on the wall, flowers cut and arranged in your stead.
Colors. Sights.
No sound, no you.
After I left the cemetery, I took off my blouse. Pressing my nose into it, to smother my tears. I caught magnolia, tea, incense, my sweetish natural scent.
So different from your salted territorial musk.
Stumbling and half-blind, I slid one of your freshly-laundered shirts over my head, and used it as my anchor. Lying on your bed, I felt my soul dripping onto the duvet.
You are gone.You were the love who loved me. The one who cared, who would go insane without me.
Who will bury their face in my blouse, before it is packed away for charity, upon my timely demise?
I.
It is windy and wet. The temperature is falling. I went and stood in the middle of the street.
No one drove by, the birds are tucked away for the night. Even the ghosts have crept back to their crypts.
My hair, a sodden tangle, hangs around me, wishing to be fastened into a noose.
For my neck only.
Such a personal thing that should not ever be transferred, unlike a candle flame.
II.
I nod and tell others I am well. My laughter cuts my mouth as I expel it, sharp slivers of gaiety that have no meaning.
No truth.
I look for that elusive truth. In the deep soulful eyes of that one, in the strong supple hands of the other one- his black painted fingernails gleaming like a beetle’s carapace. It is not in the puffed lips of him or in the riotous long hair of him either.
Nor is it find with the tender yearning of this one, the harsh promises of that one. Not even the turgid cock of the favored one, dripping cum like a faucet in the barn, holds it.
III.
Offers of flesh, fidelity, debauchery, submission, cruelty, gentleness, lust, desire. All the same: Nothing.
Syllables that can be arranged in any and all ways but equal a simple word: non.
IV.
To touch someone, is to caress warmth frozen by my breath and reduced to stone and watch it crumble with each stroke of my fingers. Wind and time converge and condense, wearing them all away in the twinkling of an eye. They receive the rapture at my cold hands. Could we have known?
V.
I am trapped, struggling to break through this looking glass that has been ground for me. My mouth belches out words in water-that same water falling from the skies that I stood in. My eyes are fixed upon the moving forms that cannot see me. Nor do they wish to do so, for who among them is strong enough to gaze into nothing?
VI.
My heart is ashes, pumping dust through the thin plaster shell of my body. My eyes leak trails of sand, such tiny grains of silica, down my carefully composed cheeks.
I wait for the wind, that pushes the rain, which will one day disassemble me and blow me back to you.
You crawl to me before the dawn. Softly begging pleading. Your whispered words curling around my ears like poisonous vines.
“Please.
I love you
Don’t go.”
It takes to much to deal with you, your desires, your needs.
Because I do not want you. You refuse to see. I told you that I love another.
All I can do for you is hold you down and catch your tears, as a man takes your ass and I laugh at your shock.
There are times that I fail.
There are times when I lose.
There are times when I do not even care to try.
