'When I’m Gone' – A Poem

Please deposit your happy expectations at my door.

Hi there

As happens most months, I’ve written a new poem to nestle amongst my weekly fiction and other musings.

Happiness is sometimes a difficult façade to maintain, even when it’s not one of life’s goals.

Until another, better time…

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Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash

When I’m Gone

When I’m gone, you’ll remember departed years,
turning faster whilst our lives grew duller.

As I fade, you’ll remember empty words,
their irrelevance laid bare across a divided bed.

After I die, you’ll remember lost love,
divorced from a glittering, dreamt future.

Before I disappeared,
when we existed
within a ‘had-it-all’ pretence,
few knew how far I’d let you down.

But you remembered everything,
in silent retellings of that hurt.
Where and how we fought,
yet retaining compassion to forgive.

I could never see into
your shuttered thoughts.
I slunk instead into my cave and hid,
until my body outlived my brain.
An echo-filled cavity eating
into my disputed reality.

My brain stumbled
in fits and starts.
Thoughts escaped from
rational rhyme or reason.
Fragments screamed
into long, ghost-laden nights.

Swept into confused spaces,
scuttled by destroyed cadence,
my unchained words flourished
amongst mistaken memories.

A working mind followed in your wake,
to help relive the pain I caused,
leaving me as a torn paper cup,
spinning alone in eddies of shame.
Your presence a mist-layered dusk
my heart will die to meet again.