Poem by Guest Poet LC

Poem
by Guest Poet LC

With your help

I write to you a melancholy state something I remember, but never had

Between us there was never love, nor anything more than there ever was

Yet you, both, primal elements in my prior worlds, still grapple with my sign

Where did your speartips pierce, I see no wound upon me

When did you skulk away.

From where I can remember, it was never you not I to leave, but left alone we were.

Let alone I am.

My goings and comings have produced ponderous depths, and mounting lows,

Remaining me, with chapped hands that carry nothing by their quasi scars.

I love you both, I swear it. I only know it now.

But now is known only because I felt in then, each of you once.

You, the earlier:

I was at the house of a friend no longer, a kid among them kids.

Out back pretending

to be lost in a game

youthful football as they call it

though they know not how the player woke his head to see you watching.

From where did you come, who you were, we did not know these things.

There was, however, a heightened sense of presence, a pointed remembering of my existence,
as there should be.

As it should be when people find you. Have all your lovers felt awakened by your stare? Have all your plays been returned? Damn it has anyone noticed your tender sadness without being told so first. We were something, for a moment,

But we were young and nervous, and forced

by our friends. The same ones we have now, in that none has changed. But has anything ever; changed? Is not the world but a letter of a voice ringing out? Is not the call of confusion asked us every day? The eternal is the moment, and the memory its guise. Am I not still pretending to be focused on the ball?

Oh and you, friend, found first in a field of apples, between cabins, upper-class at the camps. Gentle and perfect, I see your comfort as you call.

Yet that was not where I truly found you as a helper torn from my side. It was on vacation, when you saddled upon our ship. We were older than we let it, as we danced easily between the opened doors.

I only felt it when you left, but I have heard its torment pressing since.

Absence: You were gone, what I never knew was there had left me.

It has never left me, only led to places I still reminisce and rehearse and remember

only to relive without choice. I do not choose to miss you children, I did not think I ever would. I would have let our fingers touch just once, that’s all.