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’Til Death Do Us Part

A Poem

I know you mean to leave me,
“That’s what,” you say,
“will mend the gate”
and break this cycle of
give,
give,
give,
and never take.

I know the logic
I’ve seen the signs:
like torn bodies lain ‘round
ill fated,
left behind.

My heart, it breaks!
Just tell me, …how?
How can I consign to you
this love, this last glittering gleam of light,
all that I have, all that I fight
to never lose, to never blight?

If I let go,
then I design
a life of naught but darkness;
a life of void,
nothing left divine.

Go on then, try it,
you won’t rip it from my arms,
you can’t tear away this magnum opus I so dutifully refined!
Alone, without abandon, I fed it all my soul
created, infiltrated
’til inseparable,
entwined.

To you this death may gift new life, a variable rewind
but for me — the laceration of my voice, my song.
Leave me now and I shall ne’er escape
the sound, that crack of crippling howls in the night
not those that issue from my mouth, but
those that seep, unhinged from my mind.