After

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