One of the things I love most about poetry, especially the words you write in the heat or ache of intense emotion, is that even when you’ve healed up and haired over, reading those words makes that moment real and bright once again in your mind.

Hopefully, when those poems and words are the rock-bottom kind, we can look back, feel the gut-sting, and thank our lucky stars that we wrote the words down instead of burying them inside to fester. Because like trials and hardships, joys and celebrations, everything in life is in constant motion. We live in flux, and especially as writers, must catch the moments on their sharpest edge to be reminded, in the dull lulls between, that life is brilliant and biting, and every moment worth being present for.

I hope you all have some dark words out there, and by out there I mean on a page or in a journal and not sitting still inside your chest. I hope you all are walking in brightness now, with a touch of perspective and an appreciation for the battles that made us stronger.

And now, this:

Spectre

Dawn breaks
and the spectre of you
lives in my chest
ever-claiming, each cell of my useless heart

I wake and you softly stir
the creature in my rib-bone cage
a wooden spoon against an empty pot
you push my blood to move
to exist
and though I so desperately fight
against the notion,
I blink

I rise

If only you’d leave me in peace
I could go
stop fighting, stop pushing
stop throbbing heart beats against
this useless existence
and tissue paper flesh.

It goes on in this way
from the rise of the sun
cresting over head
to when it crashes back down
over the western sky

Still you stay

fighting to continue
determined to survive
against ribs that long to be still
and lungs aching to be emptied one last time

Night comes like false reprieve
bearing sleep, the closest I can come
to separating my soul from your memory
a little death where I can close my eyes and pretend
the uplifting will finally cut the tie
the chain of love, I so stubbornly tied.

But dawn breaks
And the spectre of you
still wakes in my chest.