POEM - Clothe Her Bones

I met a dying woman in the inky womb of a moonless night

She’d been listening to Maxwell where I’d been hearing Kate Bush

Her embrace smelled like a million tears I was free to take for granted

And I made love to her nearly-newborn ghost

the way my mind had been doing since the moment we made

our doomed introduction

It was almost her turn to exit stage right

I was in denial, even as she whispered her one and only I love you;

even as news of her final breath weighed, like an ocean, upon my lungs

She said nothing insightful — such as we all might imagine —

leading up to the kiss of that inevitable avalanche;

only that I was the first person she thought to call

when the reaper leased that spare room she had for rent

Now her name draws blood from my present

with its undeniable presence in our undoubtable past

And I’ll never say it again the way I said it

in the walls of her failing body, no

You’ve come to these words in search of purpose,

yet I have nothing to offer you;

unless, that is, you count the slow regret of mortality’s impartiality

This is to say: It should have been me, but it wasn’t

Thus, that small line in your play may well be the last in theirs

So take no invitation of love for granted,

for this day is someone’s last, even if that someone isn’t you

And the hard part is knowing you won’t hear my warning

until it’s something akin to too late

When you know what it is to hold (for the first time) tomorrow’s ghost,

you’ll understand that some tomorrows are an unwinnable dodge

of that oncoming train

You can’t forget the end of those you’ve loved and lost,

nor can you ignore that you aren’t yet ended

And you’ll never be sure if the dead are still living through us,

or if we secretly die in slow motion alongside them