Where did you go
that I followed through a house
of endless lives?
How could I know you?
How did you expect me to?
What is hidden behind a door,
a night deeper than darkness?
What could I know of you
in the cellar of life?
And why does one so beautiful
hide?
Show up with a longing
to have me know,
I knew you once,
many times?
Forever?
And where, dear phantom, does that leave me,
toiling through the fragments of a dream,
as one who comes on an unsigned journal
that tells a story only to itself.
But I wept as I read it,
I cried because I am not sentimental.
Because lost things are truly lost,
and it is more pain that I can bear,
but there it is,
truth spread out on a page
of lost selves,
rooms,
conversations,
a lost life I might have known,
and who took it from me?
Or did I leave her, and
see her full of loneliness,
and pay a price for some crime
I’ve forgotten.