Harsh and bitter dawn steals again
Across my sleepless eyes
And fills my heart with dread...
For stark daytime has never been my friend.
And the solace of the starless night where once I found
Peace and refuge from all burdens
Only serves to mark the passage of another day
Where I do not know.

Minutes pass in quiet desperation
As I grieve the loss of one who was a part of me
And despise the very existence of home once filled with joy
Whose walls echo now with emptiness and absence.
For what I know and you must discover
Is you cannot run far enough away to escape your pain.
For it is carried inside – like a malignant cell
And all the drugs in the world will not relieve its weight.

Words of your hypothesis echo in my mind leaving agony in their wake
In the void of your present silence,
Leaving me to consider three hypotheses of my own:

One) The things you said, the things you did, the way you were –
Was it all a lie, a con, a hustle, to get what you wanted?
And when you thought it was gone so were you?
And if that’s so, how could I be so wrong –
You did it so well, and at such a tender age,
I’d not been fooled this way before
Which leaves me full of doubt and betrayal
And a profound loss of empathy, no ability to trust,
A bitter self-loathing pill to swallow.

Or Two) You said too much that day, you laid it down for all to see
Then made a promise you feel compelled to keep
Turn your back on me and walk away.
In stoic silence suffer what you feel is loss
Of home or comfort or acceptance or whatever need was filled here.
No one has taken that away from you,
You toss it on the garbage heap yourself.
No one else can hurt me, only you – and so you do.

Or Three) You battle emotions you do not understand.
You had found a portion of uneasy peace
Whose tenuous foundation now feels shaken to its core.
But those roots are stonger than you know,
I cannot turn my back on you as easily as you do me.
So you struggle to redefine me into terms you can present
I give you back your own words:
“Why must the joys be overthrown?”

So here we are at an impasse at the intersection of our lives.
I would not have it this way.
You with what you will not say, but need to say it
Me with what I need to hear, but fear the words.
I can’t go on not knowing or understanding and exploring hypotheses
In empty fields at 3 am, silently screaming to the sky.
My soul soaring up into the heavens,
Exploding into a fiery shower on the barrenness of winter.

I do not have the power to release you from your pain
But if you are saying goodbye, do so and release me from mine.
I would move heaven and earth to lift your burden from you
But I do not know what it is or how to help.
So I wait, in stinging silence, to listen, to explain
Yet all I can tell you is that everything I did was sincere.
No games, no lies, no hidden agendas,
My only error was in reading the last chapter of the book.

11/12/94