Concession
When you wake up
and realize you can't just wake up
from a dream, though the colors are slightly off,
the shapes as distorted as the sound:
a furious churning, straining to connect across
a chasm of synapse, a gulf of intimacy;
a pulse wildly beating, asking Why
and getting no response, until the question dies away
like a withered limb, greying to ash.
When you realize
that silence is a sound itself,
that the volumes spoken by a face can fill the empty space
of what was once your heart;
that memory clutched in a sweaty fist may be
the only means you have to keep the time
alive in mind, and so you visit, again and again,
the pool of loss, knowing you may never plumb its depths.
-MAR 9/03
Rest Always In Peace, Mikey Dee.