Only the loneliness lasts
When all else goes
Memory comes
Nature abhors a vacuum.
Elders tell me
Everything changes.
I didn’t believe them then
Now I do
Everything – everyone I know –
Is gone
I always though pain came
With a scream, not a sigh
I never fully appreciated
The chain of change,
One link leading to the next
So that you can never go back
Or retrace steps taken
If you drop something
Along that long path
It is lost forever
Including love
I used to think of love
As a kind of combat,
As fundamental a struggle
As that to survive
Most clashes leaving
Both sides less
I preferred loneliness
A room with measurable walls
In which I could live my life
The only condition I feared
Was being afraid,
Though now I know
Loneliness leads to bitterness
And bitterness to hate
And life can be an act of balancing
Loneliness against pain
Love against love lost
Change against remaining the same,
What is against what can be
Should be
Will be regardless
I walk through my life
Unable to completely comprehend
What I have lost or won
What has altered inside
The floating bottle of my consciousness
I watch the days and nights pass
The young lovers embrace
The bone fields of the past
Strewed with the bleached remains
Of people’s dreams
My feet stumble over cracks of earth
As if over the shards of people’s broken hearts
I hear lies spoken as truth
And truth as if a lie
I search crystal balls
For clues of what comes next
Seeking to read the entwined
Vines of life as if tea leaves
Such feats seem as pointless
As sculpting with smoke
Each prediction lost
To the first gust of wind.
Only the loneliness last
The illusions a little less long
And life still slightly less
Than that.