lifethrupoems

There’s a heartbeat I can’t hear but I know is there

Hidden under frost and 5 pm sunsets

Burried beneath rain jackets and ear muffs I thought I wouldn’t use

Clothes bought in that moment of sun lay untouched 

Bottle growing old by the sink, full of sunscreen they said I need

I walk streets still overflowing from rains that I thought would cease

Red square remains hopelessly red-grey

Only two trees in the grove sport flowers

I came expecting suffocating crowds of laughter and senior photos

But it’s empty except for me and these two trees

The heartbeat echoes in the pink-white blossoms

But that’s all there is, all that’s here now

Only echoes of the heartbeat that was supposed to be here

There’s an emptiness in a cemetery

It doesn’t come from the lack of people

The lack of movement, the stillness in the air

It doesn’t come from the abscene of laughter, of kids running around

It comes from the emptiness within

They tell you grief is an emotion, but they’re wrong

Grief, when it’s fresh and new

Or when it hits you in a patch of sunlight decades too late

Grief is the absence of emotion

It’s that feeling of something being missing

Right next to your heart, it’s cold

And what is cold but the absence of heat

It’s the knowing that you’re not there

It’s the missing sound where your giggles would be

The missing light where your smile should be

I walk into the graveyard and it grows darker

The abscence of light reflects the absence of emotion

The grief within me spills over, the lack

It’s choking the flowers I hold

And when I place them beside the rock that bears your name

That bears what your entire life will become

They look more shriveled and dead 

Than when I bought them minutes ago

They’re empty of life and that’s on me

There’s only echoes of you left now 

The imprints of where you touched the world

In the people you met and the stories they tell

You were a person for the stories, I’ll give you that 

But now, now you live in nothing but echoes

And I, I live in nothing but the emptiness of cemeteries