Life is circular.
You keep coming back to revisit past
places,
feelings,
recesses of your mind
that you thought you’d
outgrown,
evolved past,
overcome,
surpassed.
When in reality you’re still on the same
merry-go-round,
ferris wheel,
swing carousel
and you’re getting more and more
nauseous,
queasy,
sickly,
ill.
She stumbled over their toys in the dark,
Had forgotten about her boys in the dark.
How dreams can bring back old realities,
And we have to muffle their noise in the dark.
She could feel the burning tears bubbling up,
While trying to keep her poise in the dark.
Where had that excitement for life gone?
Attempting to remember past joys in the dark.
I found her like that,
Cutting her wrists by choice in the dark.
Your eyes are what surprise me.
Those multicolored orifices of light.
How am I to focus on the rest of the world
if all the light is being absorbed by those crystal balls of color and soul?
A meaning so immense.
A feeling so intense.
Your pupils like a speck of sand
on a beach made of particles of light.
A window to the soul?
A window to eternity.
The only everlasting, ongoing essence we have to
cling on to.
That eternal essence I can feel
when my crystal orbs happen to meet yours.
Knowing that when your lids close for the last time,
the glow that penetrates from within you
into me
will continue on.
The morning fog rolled in like the undulating low tide.
Vete por aquí amorcito.
I can see the morning light consuming the streetlamp’s glow.
The buzzing dims.
The stench of wet asphalt stings my nostrils.
I dig my toes deeper into the dewy grass.
I taste the soil creeping through parted lips.
The birds retreat to their nests to greet the sun.
The quiet the new day brings burns inside my head.
Pebbles pelt me to shoo me off their sacred ground.
L ran to seek refuge and acceptance.
She will never find it.
I float off the earth and into the fog’s embrace.
Crack is an unusual drug.
Shelly warned me of that in the church basement.
She wanted me as her drug.
The train left the station at 6:00 am.
“All aboard” was the last thing she heard.
The sleek car filled with travelers’ hopes didn’t make it five miles.
The chintzy death.
She’ll have to be born again to remember her past life.
The deep mist penetrates my bones.
A love reduced to ashes—
black, flaky, burnt to a crisp—
lays contained within a pit on the sea shore.
She’s been landlocked for so long—
in a different place and a different time—
with no plans of returning to that beach.
But by chance she happens upon it, and walks by that very pit where the ashes still sit silently.
The air providing them no hope—
damp, brisk and blustery—
reminding her of the once blazing bonfire’s untimely demise.
A fire not forgotten,
its warmth still felt in her skin,
but one put out by the Dictator Time.
A fire too difficult to maintain from a distance
and one that wreaked too much havoc on her heart.
A fire gone cold—yet still familiar.
The sky was pink the day I died.
The clouds were like puffs of cotton candy.
Even the planes overhead looked as if I were wearing rose-tinted glasses.
That’s when everything began to blur and melt together,
like I was looking at a Monet painting up close.
The cold, unyielding asphalt underneath me began to soften and distance itself,
as if I lay on a mirage, its watery haze gently supporting my dissipating body.
My limbs began to lighten and float away from me.
The sounds of the scuffle surrounding me became more and more out of focus,
like I was tuning my internal radio to a different station.
There was a peaceful, decadent disconnect between myself and everything else.
I knew,
in those last moments,
I had indeed existed.
My essence pulled away from the trappings of my earthly life and physical body,
separating from that which it had employed to define itself for so long,
and—with this final act—at last existed in its true form.
