Half the Width of a Hair (Between Death and Survivor's Guilt)

I have, in the decades that passed, failed to find

A way to accept or put out of my mind

Mistakes I made half of a lifetime ago

With those whom—if they'd lived—I would no longer know,

For I know that stood long between my fate and theirs

Was a wall made of down half the width of a hair.

I'm only alive because plans go awry,

Because Dave had the same sense of humor as I,

While they're not, because friends believed when they said “I'm okay,”

'Cause I knew I should call, but went on with my day,

Because they helped others instead of themselves,

Because years of professional help didn't help.

The only excuse that I can provide

To be damaged, distracted, and preoccupied

Is I've looked for so long and I've still yet to spy

The tiniest wisp of a good reason why.

Half a lifetime of searching, and still I don't see

Why it had to be them and had not to be me.

It's Never “Never Be the Same”

I know few things are simple in Earth's broad complexity,

But I have never once stopped thinking that you're gone because of me.

I've crossed the ocean far enough that day has turned to night.

I'd cross the sorry stars if it would somehow put things right.

I learned about as much by leaving as I learned by losing you.

There's no mistake I cannot make, in anything I do.

Earth's hunger should have swallowed me, for you were always better,

and if I've gotten no worse since, I'm the same man, to the letter.

It seems you left me nothing in the lesson or the loss.

It seems as if my nature's one expanse I cannot cross.

Held By One Heel

You wouldn't even know me

If we met again today.

That burgeoning idealist

Was forever sent away.

Still more thoroughly destroyed

Was his forty-year life plan.

I simply laugh off accidents

That would kill a lesser man.

The pain that bothered me back then

Was less than today's “not that bad,”

But thinking of you aches in places

I thought I forgot that I had.

The Trade

The day before I heard the news

My motor ran on joy,

Unquestioning that life was just,

For I was just a boy.

The very day I heard the news,

That motor barely coughed,

But on the night I heard the news

My innocence I doffed.

I could not clothe the boy I was

In innocence so stained.

As I became a man, I swapped

That innocence for pain.

My tank's sometimes half-full of joy

Beneath that coat of pain.

My verses are as oft they were,

Before this new refrain.

Why I Write, Part x+267: For No Good Reason(?)

Though it's unpleasant, and thought it is trite,
For near fifteen years I've continued to write
Of a beautiful life and its ugliest end
Which I've long understood, but refused to comprehend.
I might've covered every detail, but over this I've glossed:
The world gains nothing from the writing, and the life's already lost.

Life is Loss

Life's no prison, but a holding pen.

So many enter, and pass out again,

and so we struggle to make friends.

On people one cannot truly depend.

I had hoped you'd stay until the end.

Heaven—and life's nature—forfend!

But not everyone holds the pedal down,

Blowing, over the limit, through town,

and so I had hope that I had found

Someone not so elsewhere-bound.

One day, I looked up and you weren't around.

In expecting that you'd wait,

There's a truth that I didn't anticipate,

Learning it only once it was too late:

Some don't just leave; they accelerate.

Decades, it took, to remove the gloss,

To learn that at life's core is loss;

All the world's a ride, and that's the cost.

To Past Gaffes Once Tethered; By Concussions Unfettered

You disappeared, and you left me your ravings.

You vanished and left me with thoughts of the grave.

You left me at least an egg-carton of doubting

and a Costco-sized grief to write poems about.

It's been months since I wrote about you. You're less searing.

Is a dozen a magical number of years

Or have I just found it convenient forgetting?

You call Freud; I'll call Kreskin; we'll settle the bet.

I once worried what forgetting would make me. I'm seeing

That for better or worse, there's one possible 'me.'

The Advice I Wish They'd Give You at Graduation

I wish I could go back and tell you

What you meant to the people you knew.

I wish I could go back and tell you

That I've lived parts of what you've been through.

I wish I could go back and tell you

That everyone and everything they taught you—said—

Will never be enough,

That you must teach yourself to be enough.

I wish I could go back and tell you—

Show you—that it can be done.

I wish I could go back and tell you

That our times were the best of my life,

But I can't.

I wish I could go back and tell you,

But I no longer wish I could go back.

The Mistake/The Heartbreak/The Second Take (Radio Edit)

I took a break from being a friend

To be lousy and lazy and human,

Not to live up to what my future's been.

The heartbreak, if not the mistake, may mend.

It's not having done wrong and been right.

It's not even the fact that I survived.

It's that my mistake came to define

Your life,

and I've learned to cease letting it define

Mine.

How can I be fine with being fine?

The Mistake/The Heartbreak/The Second Take

I took a break from being a friend

To be shitty and lazy and human,

Not to live up to what my future's been.

The heartbreak, if not the mistake, may mend.

It's not having done wrong and been right.

It's not even the fact that I survived.

It's that my mistake came to define

Your life,

and I've learned to cease letting it define

Mine.

How can I be fine with being fine?

Me and Your Shadow

The cremated lack for crosses,

and it's been years since I saw your tree,

But in many ways, I still live in your shadow.

Everyone I know sees me darkened by it

Every day wondering if, sometimes,

The unforgettable is meant to be forgotten.

That Third Decade

What kind of self-respecting decade

Passes in a second?

It would have to be the desperate search–

Both wearing slog and wild ride.

First you were gone,

and then I was gone.

We all disappeared, in our own ways,

On our own ways

Only to come back as somebody different,

But you are still gone,

and I came back all wrong.

I'm not sure if the problem fell off or latched on.

I needed retroperspective to notice it at all,

Though it's impossible for anyone else to miss.

So Was Red

I didn't really kill you,

So I didn't really go to prison.

I just lived the next year

Someplace I hated even more

Than remembering–or forgetting,

Though I didn't do the whole year,

Or a whole lot of living.

Still, you and the time are both gone.

Both of us are free.

Bitter Afternoon

The wind woke me whole, like a good woman's breath.

It playfully nipped at my face and my neck,

Enlivening me, softly cooling my head,

Pushing newfound awareness to the ends of my flesh,

and I went out, eager to put right before left.

That was the day I found out she was dead.

It's Better Than Nothing

It didn't make sense. Not now. Not to you.

The story was just too horrific to be true,

But if it really did happen, it would have been quick.

I suppose that's better than nothing.

The fury clawed its way out of my lungs.

If this had to be real, if there was nothing to be done,

Then I would try to burn everything down with my tongue.

I railed against a world that would bear you away

On the wings of your own demons,

But what I railed against most was me,

The so-called man who might have seen something,

But most certainly did nothing.

I didn't make the healthiest scapegoat, either,

But I guess I was better than no one.

I begged in the short term for time's fruit, understanding.

Not finding it, I wondered what I should be doing,

and agreed, to myself, that this will never happen again,

That there would be no me if there was anyone in need,

That this mistake was the last one I had in me.

There's nothing so deadly as a deal with an angel,

A loan against time that I'd already borrowed,

A desperate, delaying denial of some horrible inevitable,

Which I guess is better than nothing.

At the failure of the futile path that I chose,

My one true talent did itself soon disclose.

Not so good at a little bit of help,

I showed some aplomb for get-the-hell-out,

and I wrote a new set of rules for failure:

Once–try harder, twice–hide.

I suppose it was better than nothing.

So now, on a path ten years in the traveling,

I have achieved at least some measure of understanding.

It never should have happened, but it did.

Death's not half as deadly as living with it.

Dedicated to My Roommate, the Ghost

I am a lover of science, who believes fervently in ghosts

Because for the last ten years of my life, my head has been the host

To a woman whose corporeal life was ended in gunflash,

But has taken this long to die in my mind–and more, for she's not passed.

At first there was the missing, both the laughter and the tears.

Since that ended, I've blamed myself, a hobby lasting years.

I don't content it's all my fault. I didn't take that shot,

But frankly, she's been gone so long, that's all of her I've got,

and if that's all of her I'm holding onto, I can see how that sounds lame,

But if I believe in cause and effect, I must believe in blame.

A Golden Ghost

A golden ghost crosses in front of me,

As stately and fleeting as a memory,

and I know that she's still not truly gone,

If only because she's who my mind landed on,

But it can't really be her, dressed in red and black,

Because the departed never really come back.

Why I Write, Part x+208: Her Smile

Her smile is in everything I write,

Most obviously when the words are bright,

But also, maybe especially, in the sad stuff,

When the memories are too much or not enough.

In truth, behind every smile is just a mouth;

Behind the smiles of the dead, a pool in which to drown,

But even in deepest despair, I remember her greatest talent:

Pulling a smiling tarp over her heart's pool of sadness,

and as my writing brings satisfaction at the end,

I may even have surpassed her, in that one respect.

I Wasn't Listening, Pt. 2

An incomplete list of what's wrong:

1. I have a listening problem.

2. You are dead and gone.

An incomplete list of what I didn't hear:
1. Your fear.
2. Your despair.
3. You couldn't find escape anywhere.

4. Your silence.

An incomplete list of what it meant:
1. Someone.
2. Anyone!
3. I'm almost done.

An incomplete list of my reactions:
Then: Nothing.
Since: No learning.

There's silence out there I'm still not hearing.

Had/Didn't

I know what you had that I didn't:

A soul, a heart, a brain, a mission,

Talent and toughness, reason and rhythm,

A history of making less-than-stupid decisions,

Support at home, and more from close friends,

A path, a plan, a future, and a bad end.

What I've never been able to figure out:

What in our lives was the other way around.

What did I have, that you didn't?

What did we both need, that only I had?

Why did it have to go so bad?