Grief is love with nowhere to go
– Helen Macdonald.

 

Your absence fades like the decrescendo of bluesy music in my room.

Like a shuffled playlist,
it keeps rewinding itself in my eardrums.
In my memories.
In my mind & silent impulses.

A crescendo of your appeal left me willing my sanity
to my darkroom longing for security in insecurities.

I searched for you in every darkness & light.
In every constellation that beams with hopes.
In every air that breathed your name.

In every room that couldn’t eclipse your presence.

I practiced solitude until I could make my
body sleep at a moment’s notice.

My first journey of survival began with liquor & flame,
with a pen & paper caught between the pages of an unfinished poem.
Watching you,

Mother strode across the door into a sickbed that withered you from your son.

They call it a coffin, but I call it man’s safest bed
from trials & tribulations. I pulled myself back to happiness,
transposed it through a clad smile. I swallowed grief
& forgave it as much as I could.

I gasped at your absence that survived & again at your presence that dawned.

Mother, I empty your unaddressed letters tonight
& ask me how long will we build distances?
Uproot forgetfulness, watch it germinate
into a get-together party of mother & son.
I wrote poems. You called them untwined kites.
I know they’ll never reach the pinnacles of heaven & your breathless body.

My yearning of you tastes of vinegar
To be grieved is to always be blamed
for what fate never planted but uprooted.

An upheaval of depression & I’ve drowned again
in my dug pool of melancholy, like a victim,
all I see through this distance is a victim of fate & grief.

I am walking toward what I hope is without distance.
Mother, may I find you there!

 

 

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