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.
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