There’s not a dent where you were
There’s nothing to mark that you even breathed
This unchanging dusty air
Which is worse?
I wonder as I pour the milk
The splashes make a pattern
I suppose it looks like tears
It’s funny that even milk cries
While I just sit and stare
And try to make sense of nothing
I could make you a nothing
If it would make it easier
But the pictures tell me you were someone
Something at any rate
Some figment spouting opinions
I don’t know if you mattered
In the grand scheme of my life
Because they tell me
Things that matter leave marks
I suppose I do feel raw and reeling
Freshly cut open somewhere
But there’s nothing there
Except my own fingernails on skin
[I pull my hand away before half-moons appear
blood-filled and obvious
unlike those in the backdrops of our photos
I sigh and begin to clean the splatters]
Maybe I’ll get past breakfast tomorrow.
Author notes
This is here because.. I put everything here even if it's crappy. No idea where this came from. I need to edit it a bit. I've never lost (death or otherwise) someone, so I suppose it's slightly pretentious of me to write this... It just kinda floated up out of nowhere.
the bracketed part was added. I'n trying to decide if like it, or if I should remove it.
Written September 21st, 2005
What did you think
Comments
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Wow. For someone who has never experienced loss, you sure do describe it well. You captured the numbness and the emptiness that people feel, yet feel so guilty about. The "I should be crying" feeling. The shock and the confusion. The questions. It's all there.
I happen to like the breakfast line, and the way it ties in with the milk pouring earlier on in the poem. It shows that the speaker is trying to make it day by day, struggling to make sense of all of them.
So, yeah, "wow" is my basic feeling. Beautiful.
Edited on Sep 26, 3:47 p.m. because 'I left something out. *dork*'. -
COMMENTS: overall it went together really well, and you wrote it well, and i enjoyed it. i also really liked how you explained the imagery in this poem, even though i had to reread it, after the breakfast line. umm just a thought, but i think it sounds better without the breakfast line... idk..that could just be me.. but...
CRITIQUES: you played over one idea at the beginning, stumbling-trying to make a new line. -
Cynthia, that wasn't pretentious at all - it's a great poem, if you must know - and loss is a feeling that we can all relate to or at least understand if we've never suffered a really personal one. It was a great feeling you communicated, though - most of us may not be remembered by the world at large, but we all mean something to at least one person. A really, really great poem by a really, really, really great person.
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