Loss
Loss
Once I swore “To Have and To Hold”,
A vow made in all sincerity,
Words uttered from the heart.
But how strong? How long?
Two joined as one unto death
Yet such vows can be so fragile.
When all the lace and dewy webs
Of ever-after dreams are gone,
torn by strife or covered
With the ennui born of time
And long association.
Familiarity breeds more than just content.
More often the offspring can be contempt.
The bitterness in looking back
To see all that has been lost.
A hand to hold, a gentle touch,
Or soft caress now gone, forgotten.
Are wages not of sin,
But Loss.
How do others see me now,
Hollowed out, a wraith bereft of substance
Alone and wandering without direction?
So they once seemed to me,
Oh, I’ve seen it many times before,
Old friends and new acquaintances
Stripped to the bone
In mimicry of my own drear life.
As solitude consumes their souls.
They seem but mirrors held before my face.
Am I to be another Dorian
Locked into a heinous deal, as within
I shrink and shrivel without betraying
Any outward sign?
Loss is our common denominator,
A thing that binds us all,
Like birth and death
And the passing of those we love.
Time is our common defence
Where future o’re takes the past,
Healing grief with Lethe’s touch,
Filling gaps, once so immense.
We suffer Loss as caverns carved
By millennia of thundering waves,
Carving out the shoreline of our lives.
We fill them up with buttresses of
Rituals that serve to share the pain.
We formalize the loss and
Make a place to lay aside our tokens
Of remembrance in the hope
That they remain where buried
And haunt us no more.
Ululations echoing through the air
Give way, in time, to utter silence,
More bitter than the taste of grief
More haunting than the ghost of woe
More fearful than the emptiness
Of Loss.
Palimpsest 
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