Darkness has settled in around me.

I've worked myself into the ground. Dawn until beneath the moon.  The cicadas and the frogs of my youth cry out.  A break from the labor to light a smoke and rest my overworked legs. My ears embrace the sounds of the southern night.  Calling out to me like a prodigal friend.  They are different now without you.  I hear a different tune. Somber and low. A silent grief upon the hills.  A heavy sadness.  And I look up to the darkened windows. Where once there was such life and warmth. The house sits empty and unfinished.  A shadow of the past. Nights on the front porch swing and cracking walnuts on the drive.

Its almost as though you're still there.  Inside that facade of the house you built. From the life you gave us. I almost expected you to greet me at the door and usher me inside for breakfast and coffee stiff and black. 

But you never came. Even today its too hard to wrap the sordid mesh of my brain around your absence. 

A house without a lady. Fields without an owner. A family without a Matriarch.  A black sheep without a Grandmother's gentle hand filled with faith.  And I miss you always but even more so today than the day before. 

The magnolia bloomed

With its eyes wide open

To him holding her tight:

And I burst into pieces

Until we weaved into space

Metaphorical love ...

Found in white flowers

Blooming for a day and

She spread her legs

To fear and vulnerability

And with the mist of cold winter 

In a blanket of white 

He was watching the gloss --

Swaddled in ice 

And his snow-kissed warmth

From his ocean of comfort

Sharp light was reflected 

But melted in tears and 

The deepest compassion

For a new beginning raining

And preparing him for --

Spring unexpected 

In the verse of a poem

Not yet written, but felt

Last night was a surreal trip of a fallen women found inside the folds of the thick molasses streets of her mind. Trapped by the mania, my skull grew busy with bodies resurrected by the witching hour. Their solemn pace was echoed by the erect hands of my wall clock whose face eavesdropped with judgement. Innately out of sync, the beat of my own heart fell half-time to my pulse racing in double-time through my tightening veins. And from my bedroom window I watched the night sky swell with anticipation and vast absurdity all at once. My body ricocheted with a slowed palinopsia effect, as everything around me played on fast forward. Disembodied voices shouted spoken word from the back of my head, as an uproar of Vivaldi's Spring haunted bouncing against the walls of my brain's cask. I could smell warmth permeating from beneath the earth's crust, life rushing palpably through the roots resting in the darkness. I tried to write down the words that I saw scripted in ash rising up from my own embers of flesh on fire, but my hands were paralyzed. I was completely coherent yet caught in-between the layers of white fuzz consciousness, and it somehow felt safe. In a crescendo of lifetimes erupting for one solitary night, my path was burned in front of me. The past and the future weaved into a braided communion arousing all of my senses into a state of euphoric enlightenment, and I was finally fully awake. 

His honey hair 

Bare page skin

And eyes like thyme-leaved bluets

Tore my desire with

His tragedy and comedy

My Thalia and Melpomene

Palpably sweet to

My mind composing 

Our love affair scrolling

From the beginning of time

To the end of days 

Memorializing our poetry

Branded hot on

His vulnerable flesh 

Touching my need with

Our bodies weaving

And seducing me into 

A state of melancholy 

From a conscious longing

Laced with dreamy perception 

And pulsing with antiquity 

Imagined and drifting

Taunted wild by illusion

And sketched permanent

Onto my Aphrodite soul

But splitting my reality 

The blinding fantasy 

Of a passionate novella

Found and experienced

In two strangers crossing

My heart heals for you, mending through the empathy I ache for you. And hope carried by compassion is resurrected, and it breathes the life back into my lungs. Your fair flesh is on fire, emanating the most beautiful light before my eyes. I love you so much, as I watch you roll your cigarette in the passenger seat of my car.

Maybe if I murdered your mother

And stitched a zipper into her spine

And stepped into her pale skin

Aged with an Appalachia fog

I could exist in your world --

And zipping myself into your life

Ruminating inside your existence

I would saturate your mouth with my saliva

Moistening your heat with --

The richness of ...

My blood is sticky

I am a tightrope strapped with confusion

And I miss you.

Your boy will sail away and

Your mother stays busy

I want to slither

Like a snake under

Your knitted afghan of

Prophetic words weaved

Deceiving me and --

Leading me into

A false love borne

From faithful obligation

You told me the pool was blue

And they named you their Savior

Your demons are perched on

Your back Weakened with obligation.

I drink until the words are blurry on the page

One long run-on sentence continuing into --

Oblivion waits

And my flesh is thin

Like paper doll arms

Thin and tearing

And disconnected from

Everyone else ...

I fucking miss you,

And I can't undo this.

I regret leaving,

I truly do.

But perhaps being apart,

Will be better for me and you.

I'm not worthy

Of your unending love,

Which I take for granted.

I don't want your trust

When I have broken it

So many times.

It appears as though

You're reaching

Across a chasm

Of my own making,

When I deem myself

Unworthy of your adoration.

You're too perfect

To love one such as I,

And you deserve

A better, loving half.

But I know,

I won't regret the time

We had together,

I'll only regret

Having to leave you and

All of our memories.

Even the clouds hide daydreams 

Of jet plane rides that from down here

Are so far away they're hopeless 

Yet hopelessly, romantics still dream 

I know that the possibility of tomorrow

Can never be as tempting as 

Yesterday's "could've been" 

Because I can taste yesterday 

I held yesterday 

I labored on the foundations of yesterday 

I'm not going to talk about the millions of fish in the sea

Who always seem to be sidetracked by anything shining 

They're desperate to be hooked 

Shallow fish in an endless sea

Waters I've chartered 

By heart and stars

And prayers upon stars 

Already 

I look to the sky

Not for the future 

The past 

The clouds hide

How many nights did we lay 

At the end of this runway counting jet planes

How many times did we say it would be us

One day

We gave names to the people inside 

We sent them to exotic places 

On adventures of love and discovery 

Across the globe they'd find their hearts 

Reconnect with parts of them they'd lost

Realizing answers to questions 

They never knew existed 

We laughed! 

We lived their lives for them 

Better than they did

Somehow 

We abandoned our own 

Daydreams got the better of today 

Grounded by the reality of just how far away they really are

More work 

Than we both had ever known

But I want you to know

That my head is still in the clouds

And my heart is up there

Somewhere 

Still tumbling around

I finally found the strength to open your book today. It is the book you left behind the last time I saw you. It is a paperback reminder of you, and it is weathered with your life. Your touch is all over it and, to look at it, it breaks my heart all over again.

A World of Ideas, and its grand compilation of insight and theories from thinkers like Ramachandran, Gould, Nietzsche, and Machiavelli; they spoke to you. And to me. I opened to a page full of your handwritten notes, and I instantly felt my heart beating again. I lifted the curling pages to my face, hoping to smell remnants of you, but you were gone—and sorrow welled in my throat. I traced the words you wrote in the columns, and visualized you writing. And I could feel so vividly the way it felt when you touched me.

When I close my eyes, I hear you voice: your speech pattern was palpable evidence of your thought process. The way you hesitated when your deepest thoughts took an extra second to come to order made me love you even more. The way the prophetic words rolled off your tongue in a visual parade of your intelligence was the most moving orchestra of art that I have ever witnessed.

You and your intelligence: the level at which your intuitive comprehension and brilliant perception functioned set you light years apart from everyone else, while simultaneously tormenting you as one of your deadliest demons.

But your gifted mind felt like home to me. And it was beautiful. When you spoke I felt the lobes of your mind swaddle me in their depth and safety. I recall the time we had to pull over to finish a conversation because it was too heavy to drive through. We had to stop moving-—be still while the Cainful world moved without order around us--— we analyzed the love theories of Schopenhauer.

Your mind was a fascinating world full of penetrating inspiration to me. My muse. I was so in love with you. Instantaneously. It was a crescendo of lifetimes spent searching for something then realized all at once in the moment I saw you. And that connection will last forever, immortally.

And now I have closed your book because I can only handle the pain in small doses. A suffering so debilitating and borne from an impossible longing to taste you again.

I am going to walk outside and breathe as deeply as I can today. I like to imagine that the air I inhale was recently exhaled by you just moments before. And so I ingest you.

But the sun looks guilty today, hiding behind the clouds in its overcast sky. It is as dirty and as depressed as I feel, but I understand. I remind myself that the heat emanating from behind its filth has been cast upon both you and me, and somehow I find comfort in the perversity of it all.

I miss you and your mind so much. Nothing will ever feel the same. I hope you are well. And I hope this is our final good-bye, so that I can move on.