Everybody has regrets....everybody deals with them as best they can. Sometimes words are insufficient...

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

The response came today
The one I had hoped for,
The one I had longed for,
And yet when I opened it,
It was as if the other
Had reached in
And snuffed out
My soul,
My hope,
The reason
For my existence.

It was completely deserved:
I was even more a coward
Then than I am now.
I took what was not mine
To take
And left emptiness
In its stead,
An emptiness
That it seems
No amount of remorse
Can atone for.

Words on paper
Say I am forgiven
By a Power greater than the other,
But at times like this
They seem to be mere words
Written in disappearing ink
That fade away
As soon as they dry
On the paper.
What’s written in my heart
Is different: can’t fade away
Never will fade away
But the words speak not
Of forgiveness,
But of inadequacy,
Pain,
Malignancy,
And the botch I made
Of my life
And on the lives of those
I claim to have loved the most.

Maybe someday
I will learn
Not to poke at corpses,
To give them wide berth,
To let them decompose
On their own good time
In their own good place
Otherwise,
What comes out
Carries a disease-
A disease that poisons me
And all who share my journey
Again
And again.

-Chip Bergeron
March 7, 2013