For they represent the death of evil things

cremation of passion, and misguided attention-

and lies that blow away in the wind.

Blessed be the truth that was told in drunken fights

and the hate behind insecure defenses

disguised as selfish lustful "love"

masked, hidden, and dead.

Forsaken identities, almost certainly married

two sinful selves bound up in something

and altogether destroyed, burned apart

finally made divided, despite our best efforts

made whole again

through destruction

I should have said something,

but it would have hurt you

and that was not my goal.

You should have said something

but you waited too long.

Now it doesn't matter.

We would have said something,

but neither one of us

really wanted to stay.

blessed be the ashes of our love,

gathered into the holiest of urns.

made sacred by the moments lost,

ashes kept caged by frozen momentum,

the inability to let go of the past.

you asked that our love be set free,

ashes tossed towards the clouded sky

until they began to meld together as one,

a solid, uniform grey that paints the world

in shades of our shared discontent.

but i could not honor your request,

kept the ashes lost in the vault of my heart

that has become an eternal urn.

i carry what remains of you within me,

cannot accept that there's nothing left.

sometimes i hear your ashes whisper

from deep within their cage of bones,

they beg me to honor your wishes

and every day they grow heavier, more insistent,

as they plead for sweet release that i can't provide.

i'm weighed down by your remains

the scale is tipping towards me

threatening to spill me into the void.

i cannot set you free, even while you beg,

and even though i know it'll doom me too.

my stomach begins to grow

with parasitic love you planted.

you begged me to flush it away,

with pills or twisted wire hangers

or a sterile hospital room in illinois.

i was convinced that i needed to keep it inside,

to honor the memory you left behind.

but it's beginning to hurt, an ache deep within

that spreads every passing day since you left:

not just in my body but in my mind.

is life a gift that i'm qualified to give

in honor of a man that i no longer have?

i'm living on my mother's dime and working dawn 'til dusk.

is that a world that can support

the weight of your parasitic husk?

you begged me to let it go,

and at the time i couldn't understand why.

so desperately clinging to you,

i did not understand the weight of life.

it's tearing me apart, skin is wearing thin

you warned me that this is what i needed,

that eighteen is far too young.

i thought it was your fear of commitment

that prompted your declaration of dying love.

but you knew our love was already dying.

and now our love lives in a new form,

distorted by loss and time.

it's a life i cannot continue to live,

drained of all my time,

supporting the ashes of you until the end of the line.

i booked the appointment, i made the drive

drove past the protesters calling me a killer.

and using the money i'd been scrambling to save,

i freed the last vestiges of our love from my stomach,

and i am now faced with a new weight of moving on.

a mere clump of cells, absent of its form.

i freed it from a life that i couldn't support.

it never had to face the burden of sentience

and i never had to face the burden

of being trapped with you forever.

and the ashes of our love are tossed from the cliffs,

sent into a cerulean sea of dreams.

i am moving on like you asked me to,

and maybe now i can look for scholarships,

and go to college like i dreamed.

some may deem me a sinner,

some may hail my independence.

but i am not cursed, nor am i innocent.

but blessed be the ashes of our love,

even as they are lost to the mist.

Blessed be the ashes of our love, for they are data. Carbonized ghosts of our lives together, deconstructed in final entropy, but always present somewhere. Perhaps omnipresent within a latticework that only requires collapse to reverse engineer our love.

Perhaps some sentient creature will one day be able to sift these ashes into organs that can sense the collapsed latticework existentially--another sense like sight, hearing, or taste. An alien sense. What will that creature see? Hear? Taste?

Feel?

That creature will know us and know our love. All of it, all of us, all at once. And it will make for a lovely day.

Once upon a time,

I loved you

Like I love

The air I breathe.

Once upon a time,

You were mine

Through everything

For all eternity.

Once upon a time,

I knew you,

I felt you,

I understood you.

Once upon a time,

We connected

Like two

Colliding stars.

Once upon a time

Has become

Another lifetime ago,

No fairy tale ending.

Blessed be the

Ashes of our love,

Like dead flowers in the

Desolate garden of my heart.

You don't know...

You... just, don't know

You don't understand...I ...I can't...

I cannot breath

Without you here

I have forgotten how to sleep

Without your head

Upon my chest

Leave me in this inferno

In the ashes

Of our love

How dare you

You will bless

This incineration

Inhumane

Inhumation

With your tears

But

You know

Thanks for the memories.

Dark grey ash

coats the land

there is a faint

Thump

Thump

Thump

the wind blows a few ashes away

there is a heart

laying shattered

and stabbed

the knife still in it

bleeding

yet

the heart still gives

blindly and completely

the heart won't stop

it will give and give

until there is nothing left to give

until it is gone

We started out in red hot passion

you loved my sharp wit

I loved your handsome fashion.

Days and nights we merged together

Happiness made us light as feathers.

Oh how I fell hard for your strong

masculinity

As I wrapped you around my fingers with my femininity.

When passions flames become embers

even then the coals dying members

still burn to touch red hot

somehow distracted we both got

Its no one’s fault the fire died out

No body told us Love grows like a sprout, and you have to nurture each other or else it dies out.

So, blessed be the Ashes of our Love,

at least for a while it was a Hell of a barn burner!

Burn our Love letters:

Let it be known that I,

The Undersigned have

embraced the newest

Wave of minimalism,

and these Articles of

Faith are last to go.

Thus is my Will, and

my final Testament---

That the bundle tied,

with its tattered ribbon,

on my chest be placed,

as into the fire chamber

this soul is made to rest.

In the beginning there was

the Word, and as it was,

in the Beginning of All,

Love, so it shall be then,

these Words without End

so that even the dumbed

might know it & live again.

01.27.2023

Blessed be the Ashes of Our Love challenge @Last

Blessed be the ashes of our love that was never meant to be.

You harmed me.

And I internalized it.

The harm became what I was.

So I bless the ashes of our love,

Because it was never love.

It wasn't even tolerance.

It was hate.