Ashes
written by: Yves K. Morrow
This is our house burning
and these charred remains
are our everythings.
We could be condensed
into a letter, two pages long,
double spaced, Times New Roman
but I prefer to remember you
as a cemetery.
There are moments
when time acts as a noose
and the air between us
is no longer transparent.
I can see
the outline of your words
and the darker spaces
underneath them.
I saw you slide
into the pockets
of a girl I didn’t know.
Forgive me
for not forgiving you.
Forgive me
because the pain of loving you
isn’t worth the cost of keeping you.
Wherever your shadow falls
a star drowns
and all the wishes therein
shudder to dust.
The shape
of your drooping shoulders,
like two trees collapsing.
I can hear the slouch,
the deep but brittle exhale of a spine
broken under its own weight.
Now I measure my worth
by the distance between us.
Here is the road
with its many forks
quivering like a miracle
in the spaces that were once
littered with us.
I am an American living in a small village in Sweden with my husband and soon to be teenager daughter. My poetry deals with mental illness (in particular PTSD resulting from childhood trauma, Depression, Social Anxiety, and Dissociative Disorder), spiritual dilemmas/life’s big questions, social ineptitudes, rebellion and misanthropy, love both sublime and dysfunctional, grief, obsession, and really everything and anything to do with being human/the human condition. My fascination with the human condition led me to go door to door as a child asking people to share their life stories with me. In gathering the life stories of others I came to understand what it was to be truly loved, not because I was loved, but through the love of others for their own families. It was this undaunting belief in a reality where love exists which gave me the strength to break away from my abusive past and seek out healthier more meaningful relationships, not just with others but with myself as well. I manage a creative writing group that offers daily writing prompts, in addition, to my blog.
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