By C.
Ghost
I feel your absence as if it were present
Physically present, an incubus, an emanation
A carbuncle of ice that chills me
Hexes me into the doped inertia of unfeeling.
Now that I think of it, the ice must have
Always been there, even when your warmth was present
Not even your body holding mine at night
Ever made it sublime into the thin air of winter
For even in your presence I could already feel your absence
I could see the invisible future, your untimely evaporation
Your warmth dissipated and the carbuncle still there
The memory of you not enough to make me feel again
You yourself used to tell me not to pay heed to any of it—
No, I was to bask in the light of my personal sun,
To pretend that June could never turn into December,
That fall could turn into summer forever.
Yet it is February now and I have never felt this cold—
I have never been this cold—
All I’ve inherited from you is a frigidity of heart
That no other summer can thaw.
“But you’ve lived without him for how long,
19 years? You know how to live without him.”
The problem, my dear friend, has never been
Living without the invisible, the unknown
Life is too quick to teach us to have,
And we are too quick to learn it.
But no one teaches us to unhave—
In that case, to educate is to punish.
And yet I did not know the beauty behind suffering—
The poetics of pain, the lurid, luscious glimmer
Of the thick crimson drops of blood that again
Seep out freely out of my heart to land, frozen, on the page.