let me conjure up the thousand years

after we were born

let me sift though these memories

as they lay  revised 

cut deep through lines

of  poems and stories

with an editor’s  hacksaw precision

oozing with such bloody intention

now you’ve  burned through me

with difficulty

poured your poisons  down

with an inclination  towards faith

while i lay mustering up refusal

to believe in

the importance

of any of this

 and with your ashes

i ‘ve  surrendered

covered in the dust of you

i’ve given the last effort

swallowing the remains

of your hot gift

i’m left, choking

on the lonely gristle

of what once meant

more than

this weak dose of the mediocre

i leave on today’s pages

what we remembered together

now sits on your invisible headstone

unread

like your last, raspy whispers

unheard

if i could only speak again

without italics

without leaving exclamation points

dangling in this antiseptic air

you might hear what began as

a whimper

manifested later

into a scream

to the  night

the lines of these pages

are filled now with discomfort

and a deep to the bone

uncertainty of reasoning

through transcription

nothing roars out these days

leave me to dovetail into

these endings

dropping them in silence as

 live morsels of

your raw meat

fall

left in fields

covered in thorny bushes

i can no longer name

our words and memories

best buried

mean nothing now

when left

as a feast

we cannot reclaim