by Brian Hickey

Created on: November 20, 2009   Last Updated: November 22, 2009

...swimming to the moon
would be easier than loving her. Something inside her
was broken and scattered; bare bones long since
picked clean by the carrion birds
of the capricious twentieth century now gone.
When ,with me alone ,she showed the happy
inner child, wrapped in bright ribbons of joy
and wonder, chasing fireflys and moon beams
and star light; sleeping deeply with always a smile.

...but when tasked to be with The Others, she shrank
beneath the waves of herself. "Tell me
about books I have never read", or "show me
some place I have never been", or "tell me
again the lies I know best." How she wished
simply "to be in the world" without the
haunting ghosts of her inabilities, her short falls.

...she would say she loved me and laugh outloud;
she would tell me she hated me screaming and flaiing away;
she would pretend not to know me and ask me my name.
I gave and gave and gave until I had nothing left; not even Hope.

...she took her own life, as I knew she would.
Whatever the deamon that fed on her soul died with her.
No ropes or razors or pills or exhaust; not even a bullet.
She just walked out onto the center divide, closed her eyes,
and waited for someone distracted to plow her
off to a kinder, gentler Heaven.
I gave her a part of me to take with her
I will never regain...

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