---

should they take days to find you
having lost half your blood through your selfless wounds
and not telling anyone
(until you shook from weakness,
drawing the onyx stones of your eyes to the bed
moaning through the meat of your lungs
as I a ghost haunt the numb shell of your hallway)
and find a mere husk of a soldier
filled with traces of shrapnel and heartless foreign objects
as you are to me now
a shard and many
absorbing desperate questions you cannot answer...
to listen would require more
than merely measurement
if only I could follow the certain hell of you
chasing restless winds to the ocean and back without sleep...
to truly see would be the breadth of a bird's eye
at the height of a migration fierce enough
to render stasis into symbiosis...
a pronouncement more fatal than death itself;
your pulse scattering pigeon tracks
across the snow
of a vacuous listless screen
that talks for you in façade of pulses
that feign such poor excuse for boldest breath now slow...
while the pain of lying there, yet to yield
falls as heavy rain on that windshield
endlessly before you in your never-waking dreams
the torrential skies now weep
the wail of a cry so desperately deep;
the abyss of a senseless world
driven to treacherous, all-consuming screams
on roads as numerous and void as your now empty veins
losing themselves
beneath your skin's vast yellow plains;
your smile a distant fading map
for this your last room...
and its final cursed white blinds
open upon the parking lot
where they brought you
visionary and reeking
out of the grip of darkness
and into a blinding lethal judgment
of fateful imminent words
behind drawn whispered curtains and
cold, fate-sealed steely doors.

[Revised] Copyright © Jeff Mason 2022