black stamp

after the settlement made official -- with a splodgey
black stamp, on a neatly creased piece of letter-sized paper,
a final, dignified and oddly drama less full stop.

cast into a shock of silence, not knowing what emotion to express,
I chose nothing. just a large exhalation, a relaxation,
then a determination to file and move on.

but I have been stamped. my heart still carries this black ink,
which -- as certain as my degree– is a permanent hue,
it can never be truly erased and lost in history.

Imprinted with attics of halloween bunnies, still life with woodpecker,
the tipsy tuesdays bringing a apprehensive smell of
misunderstood microbrew laced with a lungful of forgetting.

a fountain of faces follow me, they haunt me in their unresolved
absence. all those people who (it turns out) I never really knew.
their lasting black mark seems a largely mutual fakeness.

my thoughts cannot forget the pent-up misery and
wandering loneliness, of sitting cold in a room playing mendelssohn
to an empty futon; of silent tears emptying out to strangers.

posing curiously to examine this sticky blackness branding me,
I suddenly comprehend that for this printing
I wouldn’t have it any other way -- I wouldn’t want it to. Print this post