the lingering lyric

"tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted"

this line is lingering in my low-lighted mind like lost lovers. the repetition, the echo, the ghostly hollow of still-borne affections laying prone in these forgotten hollers, fall into me like shards of snow. i put us here, in this romantic landscape although we've never seen snow. not together. but if there is any place for death, it would be here, in some blissfully noplace vale, and we, two, crouched by an icy river, not feeling the numbing cold, but smiling with chapped lips at the poetry of it all.

that's the problem with poets. all beauty and no sense. it's just a lyric but the words reverberate in my pulse as the only syllables worth living for. how perfectly and poetically dramatic. but there is no us, no icy river, no terrible curse or symphony composed heartbreak. you do not exist. this lost comes from someplace else. i hired you to play in this macabre scene because there is something real here, something i can't touch because i don't want to, perhaps it's too sharp or too vague or too rough or too fragile, perhaps it's too close, too close, even for me. this line drums in my ears constantly. there is something i must set out into the world, over and over again until i have embraced the reality. i want something prettier than myself, i want something darker than my lonliness, i want a scene so steeped in tragedy that the whole world will weep. why? because this is what it feels like, this line, "tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted". the reality feels more like the poetry, and the everyday experience of life is deeper than what's in front of us. of course, and so, crouching next to you, you without a face, with cold hands, the eyes of an icy river, being with you in a hushed holler deep within me, is the reality. in this line, i exist in a more full understanding of time. here, typing, here heart pounding, eyes darting, here, holding your hand, here, remembering.

tell me someday if we talk, are you afraid of being haunted. and i'll tell you that i am haunted. i used to think that i spoke this line, this was mine to ask of another. but the more i hear it, the more i know, it's me. this line haunts me. but what am i afraid of?