In June,
there is a soft multitude of you
cascading through the dying light,
with quaking hands –
I could not cup them quickly
enough to drink you in.
Last night,
while the sun was busy dying around nine pm.
I found you in every shade of its gentle outburst –
we were becoming acquainted again.
Why is violence always the catalyst?
My odes to you are fledglings at best,
are you patient enough to let them
catch the breeze and become
intimate with flight?
The light was softer than usual,
like the bones of a bird,
it was thin, supple, and lithe,
it peered in through the vestibule
window, and rested on the only
portrait of you in this house.
Was that God being brazen,
or was it a macabre anomaly?
You’re here, tangibly present,
ready to dissipate into a thin
wisp of smoke, as if December
had crawled into your lungs,
waited with bated breath to
die in one last arctic exhalation.
And yet, you exist in an alternate plane,
you decided this life was no longer for you,
and found yourself another one,
convinced yourself that you’re happy
and rooted yourself into the
city of a hundred waterfalls,
cultivating peace from nothing.
I’m envious of you,
I’ve tried to kill myself
many times to either,
stay dead or become
reborn, and failed each
time,
and you did it in just one
attempt.
Last December,
I found myself with covid,
took me the better of a month
to get over it – the sleepless nights,
the constant heaving for breath, the
brain fog that lasted for quite some
time afterwards, I would be lying if
I said the thought of me dying midsleep
didn't offer me a sliver of peace,
an unfortunate but natural ending to
a story that was haphazardly written,
but things never end neatly, do they?
With death, one stone’s throw away,
I thought of confessing my sins to you,
baring myself, one last time,
but I was a coward then,
and a coward now –
the June sun looks great on you,
I still covet your skin for warmth.
What do you think July brings?
The days will be stretched as far as it can,
the remnants of a dying sun will still be
visible around ten pm, the peonies will
be in full bloom,
