Only the loneliness lasts

 

 

When all else goes

Memory comes

Nature abhors a vacuum.

 

Elders tell me

Everything changes.

 

I didn’t believe them then

Now I do

 

Everything – everyone I know –

Is gone

 

I always though pain came

With a scream, not a sigh

 

I never fully appreciated

The chain of change,

One link leading to the next

So that you can never go back

Or retrace steps taken

 

If you drop something

Along that long path

It is lost forever

Including love

 

I used to think of love

As a kind of combat,

As fundamental a struggle

As that to survive

Most clashes leaving

Both sides less

 

I preferred loneliness

A room with measurable walls

In which I could live my life

 

The only condition I feared

Was being afraid,

 

Though now I know

Loneliness leads to bitterness

And bitterness to hate

 

And life can be an act of balancing

Loneliness against pain

Love against love lost

Change against remaining the same,

What is against what can be

Should be

Will be regardless

 

I walk through my life

Unable to completely comprehend

What I have lost or won

What has altered inside

The floating bottle of my consciousness

 

I watch the days and nights pass

The young lovers embrace

The bone fields of the past

Strewed with the bleached remains

Of people’s dreams

 

My feet stumble over cracks of earth

As if over the shards of people’s broken hearts

I hear lies spoken as truth

And truth as if a lie

I search crystal balls

For clues of what comes next

Seeking to read the entwined

Vines of life as if tea leaves

 

Such feats seem as pointless

As sculpting with smoke

Each prediction lost

To the first gust of wind.

 

Only the loneliness last

The illusions a little less long

And life still slightly less

Than that.

 

 


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