After
To feel anything.......
think of anything this late
at this hour
would have me willfully
subject myself to the unspoken
yet fully recognizable facets
of what has become our reality;
tacitly exploring the leaves and loam.
A place we'd once called home
as if it still stood to this day.
To be still in this quiet...
in these moments and say
things aloud to myself
as if there were someone present
with me
lends me the possibility
of some rather awkward rehearsing
of a conversing
that may never take place.
I can see your face
so clearly
and you feel so warm near me
that I've convinced myself
that you most certainly hear me.
Perhaps you'll say something back
or perhaps this imagination
so vivid
would rather me be content
than immeasurably livid at the chance
that my wishful thought
was just that and nothing more.
To get out of this bed
and walk across this cold floor
with my bare feet
rarely ever invites the possibility
that I wouldn't recall when
we would float to each other
so temperature didn't matter
and that bite in the air was formality
and we weren't swayed by the calamity
of potential illness.
We were heat on repeat
replete with enough comfort
to ward off the elements.
Evidently elegant and circumspect
lest our desire be met with consequential removal.
We sought no approval
and brokered no lies designed
to sever the ties we've bound
yet this floor is as cold as the ground now
and you aren't hovering near me.
Won't even appear to me
without the mournful mix
of memoriam and imagination.
To think of you as a mere fixation
is to mock the truth
that you were so much more
and deny the harsher notion
that the further I'm drawn to these emotions,
the further you seem to float away.
This is yet the hardest of these days.
Devin Joseph Metz
11.9.20
