Stained Glass Puzzle

Sometimes.

Only sometimes,

do I think to myself that maybe I am okay being incomplete.

Like an unfinished canvas.

My hands are still the same color that you left them last.

Faint watercolor that didn’t spark a narrative.

I have decided to make peace with the ghost I have become.

And haunt all the parts of me that were once alive

To be a dead tree.

With roots that have grown into the place I once called home.

Life turned death, day turned night, the same inevitable cycle of returning to something that wasn’t ever mine.

I don’t know who I am.

Or who I’ve been.

Who I deserve to be.

And there’s a melancholy feeling attached to that.

The other woman.

The other man, the other thing that I stare so deeply into when I peek into the mirror

That empty vessel that I once was sits at the table now.

A drowned pirate ship sinking deep.

Deeper.

Slower.

I am the tree in the forest, slain without a sound

Because there is no one around to validate the fall.

An empty husk of someone I used to know.

This is where I plant my dead flowers

A reminder that even this stranger died beautifully.

I have watched my reflection drown in bloodstained water far too many times to deny myself humanity, at least.

I feel like a flight attendant.

And I have a home,

But the grass has grown over all my sidewalk drawings

And the piles of leaves have stopped begging to be scattered.

Wishes; that never took flight.

And once I get back to this place,

It is again for a moment.

To remind this house that I am still here.

Even if here is far from this reflection that I have made my visitor.

My palms are burned from all the candles I lit to warm myself

And it is safe to say that I have never once considered that actions have consequences.

You were all of the color I ever had.

And I realized that I’m just a hanged man who guessed the wrong letter one two many times.

Now, the rope has come undone.

And the only way I keep myself together is through bad punchlines,

Morning coffee,

And Small poems dipped in honey.