Sam Lawrence

I lie here cold and long forgotten
Buried six feet
Under any kind of spark
Or palpitation
That breaths,
Smelling sweetly of life. 

And in this cold chrysalis
I await my final transformation
Listening to the song
Of the raven overhead
That reminds me of how I left
And whispers
That even in death
I do not belong. 

I am an outcast 
Among the broken bodies
Lying next to the sons
And daughters
That were taken too early 
And the mothers
And fathers
That faded with time before 
Slipping slowly into a peaceful
Departure. 

I moved here with a new sense of hope
But left with less inside than 
Is survivable. 
I want you to understand
But I can't be trusted
To be literate enough to explain 
And I wish I could assure you
It's not at all your fault
But I'm not one who's taken to lying.

I was always drowning in a sea of words
Screaming at the top of my lungs
Desperate to elicit a response
But all I found
Was an empty echo
Of all the times my guilty tongue
Could not find the right words.

My life has passed 
As an arbitrary time
To the passing of millennia. 
My memories long forgotten
Will blow away like ash
Scattered in the wind
To coat the world 
Without meaning anything
To anyone. 

I used to dance and laugh
With my parents, dad twirling my mother
Over and over to delighted giggles
Emitted from my young throat
As I watched the epitome of a perfect love story
Splayed out before my eyes. 

But everything was shattered
With one diagnosis
And as my father's 
Health degenerated
Everything filling my soul
Left with it,
Slipping out the back door
Unheard and unnoticed,
Eventually leaving me with nothing more
Than an empty soul
And a broken mother. 

My mother was decent
Nice even
Until we watched my father leave
Not by choice
But by the forceful sever
Of Death's cold scythe
That took my father
And split her heart
Right down the middle.

The middle must have been
Where she kept all love
That once was given to me
Because after his passing I was ignored
Unless I was at fault
Or an alcohol-induced reincarnation
Of my late Father
I was still mourning after.

So we lived with the ghosts of our past
And wished we didn't have to pretend
That everything was okay
When someone came to call
Because my mother became Alice in Wonderland
Escaping down the rabbit hole
And out of reach. 
And even after the tags fell away 
From the bottles
And she found cake couldn't change Her demensions
She kept drinking
And drinking
Until she found the right balance to take her away.

So for the last three years
I floated through our hollow house
Slowly becoming a hollow shell of a person
With only strings holding me up
Until the last one frayed and broke
And I fell away from
Everyone else. 

My mother had been
Stuck in her rabbit hole
Not seeing
Me fall
Fall
Fall
And not looking up from her bottle
Or moving to get up from her bed
When I stood at the door
And whispered goodbye
And slipped away.

Away I slipped, feeling nothing
Course through my veins
As I walked across town
And down to the trestle 
That holds up the train 
That held up my frame
As I stood and pondered the endless possibilities
Stretching out before my eyes
To the endless black water so far below my perch. 

I used to be someone
Who knew
What to do and never gave up
On anything thrown my way
But I found myself
Less than I thought I'd be at the end,
Not drifting away from age
Like the blameless bodies surrounding me
But falling
Ever so quickly
To that black end
Never knowing what could have happened
Or what would have changed. 

If I could have one more second
I would have tried 
Just a little harder
To fill up my soul with something more than the superficial 
Feelings that left me alone. 
I would have fought for life
For happiness
For just one ounce of hope
That would have kept me tethered to that life
And offered a chance 
At all the lost possibilities. 

Because I gave up
Years too short when I should have stood up
For the future me I will never know. 
And no matter what the studies say
Nothing is more deadly
Than an empty soul
Paired
With a overloaded mind.