LPiA-25 Nov. 13

[dukealien]

What’s My Line


What would witty, literate
inquisitors empaneled ask
to learn your trade or mine, my dear?

We’ve switched so often, who can state
which of us drew the harder task
of living in the other’s sphere?

But as we waltz through each new gate
with palm to palm and mask to mask
our crossing lifelines merge, sincere.

---

Phone a Friend

As the years pass like tiny moths,
I find myself eaten away
not from her chemo,
her staging food like performance art,
as I lost her between bites
and found myself hollowed out.

Dance shoes in the trunk,
private jokes that never land,
punchlines forgotten,
timing gone.

She was the first I lost,
and every loss after her
sliced off something I mistook
as a part of myself.
I keep dying in fragments,
an installment plan
of becoming someone
neither of us would recognize.

Beautifully done.  How can they live on in us when they take so much of us with them?