Write loss

You cannot touch loss by hand

Like you touch a new baby or a silk piece of cloth 

Because loss runs from you

or you from it, like a never ending series of tomorrows.

You cannot see loss, 

The way you see sunshine bursting in rainbows

every morning

because your eye will twitch 

Thrice before it lets your lids onto the scenes before you.

You cannot hear loss, 

Like Beethoven to his senses

because it is mute and deaf to the sighs

of misery and the revocations of hushed whispering

that replaces the sighs. 

Loss cannot creep up to your nose

and pinch you, like a stench of a burnt out camp

or a bloody limb dripping

blood, wasting bodily iron that festers instead of water

at the roots of a blossoming jasmine.

You cannot taste the bitter orange meringue 

ruffed in white cream that loss bakes

every morning as it embraces

the tiny footsteps of who and what should have been 

standing in the mirror next to you

in place of loss. 

You do touch loss, around your ears or in the spaces of your fingers

where the ring once sat, crowned in jewels and smothered in kisses

You can see loss, wherever you turn if you look carefully

and you can hear it, beating then beeping around hospital monitors

and loss stinks and reeks, out of you on a bed after labor

after falls, and accidents and misspellings on test papers--

Loss creeps into your cracks like rivers of yellow custard 

flowing at the end of a hungry stomach.

Loss shapes you as you mold it along-

Believe me, I've tried to befriend it

but it slid beneath me, fooled my pens

even when I changed the ink's colors

For you

You cannot scribble loss

unless it hits you first in the gut

and then in the brain, 

like a speedy final destination train.