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You are you and

I am me and

The house and

The kids and

The food and

The state of the car and

The laundry and

Only one whole universe.

I feel it, sometimes

Orbiting and pulsing near my

Ears,

Encircling my 

Intestines,

Tickling my

Left pinky toe in that way that

Bites and burns inside my shoe.

I guess everything really is my fault

When I am a universe and

You are you.

I know I am a burden,

Life ever onward goes-

But absence is too easy,

Where grief’s pain only grows.

So please, my friend,

I beg you-

Please don’t leave me here alone.

I need to see and be seen,

To touch, to know, be known.

Presence cannot shatter

What already fell apart,

Be here, be still, and help me

Hold my fractured, weeping heart.

I know it’s hard to breathe sometimes,

I know it’s hard to pray,

I know the world stopped making sense

Because I couldn’t stay.

Your eyes are drained of tears to cry;

To wake and face each day

Demands the dregs of borrowed strength

Because I couldn’t stay.

In an unimaginable future,

There may be comfort I am free,

But here, in numb dark, only:

I couldn’t stay with thee.

Don’t let the darkness keep you,

Though stumble blind and crash you may:

Our hearts could never be unbound just

Because I couldn’t stay.

The Cyrene, pressed into service,
Or Veronica, rushing to aid;

The favor no one longs to render-

She is not born, but made.

I didn’t lose you,

Misplace you carelessly,

Like a set of keys or

An earring back.

I know where you are,

Where you lived and you died.

I have traced a thousand paths,

Believing in my pride

I could have kept you, if only for-

That.

I carry you still,

Biding your time until 

We truly must part-

My grief is a throbbing

Emptiness,

Hammering in place of your heart.

I have had my fill of Grief,

O’er-sated with sorrows,

Yet still they swell;

Death, the Glutton,

Brooks no ransom:

Our taste, on Earth, of Hell.

My body is lovely as it 

Holds the still full shape of you.

A last remembrance-

A promise of reunion.

He does not begin 

What He does not complete.

The empty vase pleading to remember

There is a spring.

Dim dark doubtful days

That wake in weeping 

And wracked, retire.

Myself a universe- 

And a mournful one.

Devoid of desires save

Come, my Lord,

Oh quickly come!

Today He told me:

Meet me in the Middle Places.

In waiting, boredom, diaper changes,

In deserted wastes and wasted spaces

My dew storm softly rearranges.

Flammable and 

Fragile-

         fanned

and favored.

             doused

                   drenched

                         dripping flame

So to dance-

The bush, the Ark, the stable-

            the Great Romance.