I EXHALED AND EXHALED

To the one i lost:

it's .. so hard to get through the day. i miss you so much. i thought there might have been hope of finding you again, pick meticulously through the grime and find that diamond again. i tried to tell you, didn't i? so plainly, i can hear my voice now as someone far away and i watch it all replay from above. a horror movie. "you're my diamond in the rough", hoping that the words had some weight to them, but they dissolved in front of your face and did not touch you. i exhaled and exhaled my damn heart out, wisps and gusts and water. but that is all gone now, somewhere in the air, drifting stagnantly and lonely through upstairs rooms with strangers attending but unknowing ...

i lost my breath somewhere up there, and it is so hard to get through the days without breathing. i'm trying, i'm trying but where are you? my eyes are like the trenches in a world war - so deep, so full of fetid bodies and decay. is a trench full of dead bodies really full? or is it empty? i am trying, trying so hard. but my eyes recall and pull toward the ground, toward the center of the earth, toward sin and the end and i am grounded.