Weight

Despair - 

low grade, worming, 

not fatal:

A relentless sense of loss

shadowed behind the heart.

Something I've become

accustomed to - 

heaviness, a sighing in the veins,

an immutability lost to articulation

keeping me apart.

The mass effect of it,

a petrification, a pulling nervosa 

that harries each landscape.

This quiet, coiled up grief

that stays, still weighs

despite the passing of years, the

distance from one life and 

inevitably, this other.

I am away,

withdrawn.

But I will,

I have decided,

I will plod towards

the quivering murmurations of light.

I will inhale

emanations of loamy earth.

I will heave my way forward

until I disappear beneath myself

or lift up, like a heron from the field,

into the crumbling grey mist.

- kc

Bereft Paradox

Speechless. For months,

As the snow waned to slush and gutter water.

For months,

As agonal discord bled into nebulous guilt

And the crimson of raw regret

Mellowed with latent relief.

How does one encompass the shattering

Need for change?

The protracted grief of an

Immeasurable loss arduously chosen?

The skins of bitterness left to the wind

After a fracturing of being?

Choked by the inadequate

Effluvia of words, I inhabited

A singular silence, an owned silence,

Muteness birthed from an inexplicable void,

From a paradoxical necessity – withdrawal from

One so wholly Loved.

In the lull, the flotsam of variegated thoughts,

While a gauzy light perfused the quiet darkness,

I remained dumbstruck, for months,

Unable to conjugate a nascent fullness of breath

With the familiar wash of warmth that still occurs

When I see your face.

Incompletely complete.

 - kc