DEATH Poem: Sacred Rage, by Jade Brooks

Buried deep within my skin
is profound grief

The spice of a steeped chai burns heat into my hands
Attempting to thaw the torment from my chest
Warm welcome escapes me

Cold static ebbs and flows
Laterally siphoning memories
Rising and falling
Gripping my shoulders
It folds me into myself
My feet nearly make a run for it

Yet I go nowhere
Feeling everything and nothing simultaneously

The once cozy couch offers no solace from the empty echoes
Where laughter, requests, arguments, and innocence once reigned
Deafening silence is all that greets me now

We get into the thick of it
Decoding the message behind the sensations
behind the grief

I miss them both
Equally, individually

Separation is the reality I have not learned to accept
Only temporarily distracted myself from

Guilt and I are at war
Blame referees
The fragmented crowd roars
Call the foul

Rage bellows silently above my navel
Unable to be heard
Demanding to be felt
Threatening to spill from my throat

My babies
My children
My heirs
are gone.

Reality sets in
again and again

No amount of sleep
Discounted joy
Monotonous routine,
or healing ritual
can restore the injustice
restore the time lost

We are forced to move forward

Tethered souls untethered
Dreams, stolen
Legacy, disrupted
I cling to the only one I have left
and seek forgiveness for the distance between us

Immeasurable magnitudes of disenfranchised grief
With nowhere to go
Listlessly I roam

Rose colored glasses peer in on me through blacked out tint
With ears that don’t hear,
it’s no wonder why words often escape me
We don’t speak the same language

Hope is a knife that I carry from my old life,
thinking I had time to reconcile
all the times that suppressed rage manifested as fault finding
Our time came to an end before I could tell you
the onus was never on you

Still, I wield that knife, fingers bloody
holding onto the possibility that maybe one day I’ll see you again
and I’ll get to tell you the elegy of how I tiptoed across barbed wire
and trod through the aches of reparenting my inner child
holding memories of our love above my head like an unforgotten victory
Making room for yours too

Between the sutras, we’ll exchange
the strategies we adopted to offset the pain
Through art, we’ll resolve our world with all its flaws

Please, sing to me of your love
of who you’ve shared it with and what it’s meant to you
Paint me a picture of all you’ve learned,
Let’s play every game I never had the energy for back then
Read me a story for old times sake
Get acquainted with your brother
Teach me the alchemy of each day you survived without me
of how fearfully and wonderfully you made it

God, grant me the serenity to accept the ways they’ve matured
the wisdom to have ears that listen
and the courage to speak the truth
To receive them as they are and not as I would have them
Give me the language to write intentionally
while I push through the cold static
One moment, one day at a time

Allow me to channel this sacred rage
buried deep within my skin
so that one day
when we find our way back to each other
ambiguous loss has somewhere to go.