I’ve been me so many times now,
That I am lost in the echoes of myself;
I hear them calling, hear them calling,
From beyond the weeping gate.
There the shadows kneel in silence,
Wearing masks I abandoned in softer years,
Their mouths stitched shut with old confessions,
Their eyes like drowned lanterns beneath black water.
They beckon without movement,
A congregation of former griefs,
Gathered where memory rots in black corridors,
And time hangs damp with suffering.
The house within me has grown cavernous,
Its stairways descending into impossible rooms
Where sorrow sits upright beside the fire,
A patient dust covered harbinger of grief.
It knows me by every mask I have worn,
Calls each by name in the language of mourning,
And pours black wine into trembling hands
That no longer remember which flesh is mine.
I hear them calling, hear them calling,
The selves I starved, the selves I feared,
The silent twins of all my failures,
Their fingers pale upon the rusted latch.
Beyond the weeping gate they gather,
Neither wholly dead nor wholly memory,
Waiting where the dark folds inward,
Where sorrow flowers into sullen shapes.
For doom has lived beside me always,
A patient guest seated near the fire,
Its hands folded neatly in shadow,
Its smile thin as winter beneath the skin.
It speaks not of endings but of returning,
Of circles drawn in grief and dust,
Until I no longer know if I am haunted,
Or merely wandering the ruins of myself.
Dan Verkys 