My Past

Death, thou art loosed!

My head is full

Of sounds of a shovel

Of sands shoved

Of rocks moved

Of ground punched

To sink a necessary grave-

Unnecessarily too often

Too close to the last

In too dry a ceremony.

The people I’ve buried

Graves I have filled

In song-less haste

In war’s pointless waste

Death is born.

I grope in the past

And my past is lonely and vast

Furnished with misery

Well washed with tears and worry

Ventilated by gusts of terror –

my past is packed to the ceiling with

memory upon memory

loss upon loss

too often in this war-

Stacked atop each as if

they were trophies.

My past is a place

famished then abandoned

By friends and the sun and the wind.

My past is this place I can’t leave

This home I return to

This prison that shadows me

No matter the borders I cross,

This windowless trap

This smothering grip,

This past so vast

Acres and acres of evil in my mind

Poisoning where I walk

What I think, who I meet-

poisoning.

My past is a memory

the smell of blood of kin

stinging pain of singed skin

the sound of a flaring flame

of a flame crack

the harrowing fall of my life.

 With my hands I remember

burying

people I had encountered

bodies I had entered

The hearts I had warmed

In the season of love bloomed,

Lips I’d tasted; the bonds now tested

By death broken, I buried.

I remember

That I have lost to soulless sands

To silent earth

To rocks that clatter,

then roll and settle

to graves that cover

my friends whose fatal

End is an endless bother

 that I couldn’t shrug at all -

this memory so lonely and vast

Is a grave that covers me

For since then, I've been dead

Though I walk-

Thought I walk.