Angel in the Doorway

Pink and wet and screaming
I am born into my inaugural heartbreak
Lungs violated
and with my first breath, my first dissent
I proclaim the impatient impertinence of youth
No longer victim, I chase time
Navigating how to lose
How to grieve what can still be held

This year runs into the next
I’ve learned to read my life like a book
Like a comic or a king,
I draw borders around what’s mine
I relish the pain
Exhausted and brooding, it dances on my smile

(The fire in my belly binds you to me;
the lump in my throat forbids me from
speaking your name)

The clock makes me dizzy, the way it spins
I have to look away
My hands, now wrung and now dry,
hands that are sore from holding onto time
(like a snapshot, like a glutton)
as if it were a keepsake, refuse to let go
The Ache becomes Companion
It snaps and snarls in dulcet tones
and I am lulled into familiar dreams
Dreams that once held the promise of better times,
more favourable outcomes to look back on

Now Death waits backlit,
like an angel in the doorway

Hope rusts like bent nails in loose holes,
in marked walls,
where family portraits once hung in even rows
for easy reminiscing
A loss long awaited

All mercy and grievance over
This threshold is a boundary like any other
And you will be brought like a sleeping babe to bed
A fractured breath in
An exhale long awaited

With arms empty, I’m holding onto you in silence:
an uneasy reminiscing
surrounded by pictures of ghosts unblinking
Death waits backlit, an angel in the doorway