4 Years

It must have been like this:
I was sewn so tight to your shadow
that my own reflection abandoned me.
At night my chest was wildfire
and in our bed which was once so alive
my soul was being leached out
by your neutral spine.
Your heart is OK the Doctors said
throwing pills at me like stones
similar to the ones they used
to murder their feelings long ago.
Four years was a journey of love and hate
until we finally transcended both.
And in that empty moment things were
so terribly quiet but so terribly loud.
Imagine how it felt
to arrive in that foreign place
where the promise of everything that was once
so good in your eyes
had become an unrecognizable inferno where
we could only fail to avoid the daggers.
I carried the love that became our disease
in my arms like a baby
unable to stop feeding it because it cried out for more...

How do you kill a living part of you?

It was in letting us go low to the ground
on that unmarked day
that I spread my arms wide again
and reclaimed my shadow
piece by scrambled piece
even if all I had left to assemble it
were my poor and trembling hands.

copyright (c) 2010 by Vincent John Ancona