City For The Dead

I saw you and yet

I kept quiet

I left the lines I had rehearsed unspoken

My heart still broken

I had my glimpse of the way

Our life could have been

I saw the light

Yet I let it flicker away

Spring turned to Winter

With the change of season

The chance to make amends left town

I now walk alone in a city for the dead

Saying your name

I can feel the chill of Winter to my very core

It is cold and dead

The wind kicks stronger

Branches clatter

Or maybe it is the sounds

Of skeletons being disturbed

Bones of abandonment

I feel the warmth of breath

On the back of my neck

When I turn no one is there

I wander past graves and I recognize names

Then there are countless other headstones

Engraved with names I cannot recognize

Even more that have been so worn by time

And wind that they are illegible

Their owners long forgotten

Ghosts of what

Will never be

Take shape

Materialize

Into shadows

Silhouettes reminding me

Of what is no more

The rutted asphalt

Crumbling cement

And frozen dreams are now your home

The apparitions I see are powerless

It is the memories

Of what should have been when the chance was there

That inflicts the real pain

I shouldn’t be here.

I have no place here

The dead reveal things

That are meant to be hidden from the living

As I walk away alone.

I hear you whisper goodbye

It travels through bitter icy air

Causing my frozen heart to begin to melt