Adieu.

This is my heart disguised as a poem.

Read it with your mouth pursed;
curtains drawn, breathing ever so slightly.

Read it slowly like a cobwebbed letter
you found amongst threadbare things
as you sort through pieces left behind

after the funeral. How we learn so much
after a loss. It's like life saying: Here

take this. It'll help with the pain. Like:
Watch the grass. By the time it reaches

up to here... This feeling will have
faded. Like: Say it. Don't be frightened.

Goodbye is really just another word
for something pretty. Think sunrise;

blue eyes; a new beginning, if you will.
This is a poem with an apology for a heart.

I hope you read it with forgiveness in yours.
Like: I'm sorry I'm not the type of girl

you could show off to your friends. Like:
I'm sorry I didn't have much time and now

there are people I love with adjectives like
dead, and it still doesn't seem real to me.

EPILOGUE:
The Goodbye After The Goodbye

I walk between the trees. I don't mind
stepping on the cracks anymore. I zigzag

my way home through passersby. We all
pull with us a thread that is not visible,

and I think: If I don't follow my own path,
if I make this turn that leads me back to you,

we will trip and fall and we may never get
back up again. We will become the tangled

mess that we truly are, and who would
want that? And so I walk between the trees.

No one can see the kiss you planted on
my cheek; the hole it burns through me.