ALS Diary (final part): Everything Solid Melts: Music and Love Transcend

Für V., in Liebe geschrieben.

Wrecked in route to nowhere.

On the cusp of annihilation,
Of last gasps and chaotic recall 
Of memory-splicing intellection,
Gray as old snow, last ever to fall,

I’m entombed in the icy-spectral residue 
Of an errant searcher’s existential wreck 
Were once-pure snow and rainbow-dew 
Blind omens of what our lives would lack? 
 
Or are these the stains of my wandering?
Whatever melts can reveal nothing at all 
About the radiant future we once bought:

We conjured up a holy grail of our imagining,
Inspired by the love we bestowed and sought.
And as the song says: “we could have had it all.”

Memories: the truth of falsehood.

They used to say in Soviet Russia: 
The future is fixed: the past ever-changing. 
This is true in more ways than they intended.
Our final state is the only certainty we possess. 
Life, remembered, shifts itself like the silhouettes 
Of mountains traversed and now ever more remote. 

Every remembered event is rethought and overlaid
With the blinding colors and shifting shapes of desire. 
The events resisting oblivion are creased and encrusted 
With longing: the more disfigured, the deeper and truer

Without You.

Without you
My life would have been 
A shell without a kernel. 

Without you
My being would have been 
A locked house without a key. 

I would have forever paced 
The dark abandoned streets 
Of a ghost city emptied of souls.