Death Before Life

Death to a connection so electric that your energy swept across my body before your flesh ever even touched mine.

Death to the nights we slept so closely intertwined that our cells mingled and migrated—part biology, part alchemy.

Death to your hands, large and beautiful…hands of pleasuring and fixing and describing and composing.

Death to the spot on your pillow once made concave as you lay facing me in bed, attentively listening to the mundane details of my day.

Death to the endless sawdust, the smell of fresh pine board framing and mitered corners perfectly joined as we worked side by side silently, fluidly creating.

Death to the bond inevitably deepened as we kept a long, lingering watch over the body of your father who took on the odor of fruit gone too ripe…his tongue ulcered and swollen, face unrecognizably hollowed, breath like an animal trapped.

Death to the bitter complaints of who you deserved to be, regularly spat from your mouth.

Death to my idea of you tucked into the groove of denial creased deep inside my brain.

Death to the excuses I’d carefully stitched together to veil the broken secrets of our life.

Death to your hoarsely whispered refrain that half roused my consciousness in the middle of the night again and again, “I want to be good for you.”

Death to every good thing I saw in you but for which you had no vision.

Death to my hoping and treading and spinning and gasping and wishing and striving and pleading.

Death to waves of sorrow cresting again and again as the golden chord connecting us was severed, fiber by entangled fiber.

Death to the breath that I held so long that all that remained was a toxic gas where once there was life sustaining oxygen.

Death to skin outlived and split open by the emergence of a new spirit lifted up by damp and tender wings determined to sing again.

Kim Becomes Light 2018