RHYME Poem: Mockery, by Nina Theiss

Gladly gave you my life,
Like you’d given me your hand.
Laced around the blade of the knife

Indistinct, our blood mingles.
A Tragedy, they say, offhand.

The only speaker of a language unfounded,
A couple months of fluency
Deigned to echoes of anguished antiquity.

Now, I cannot talk to the girl I died for,
Only the manic wake of our suicide pact.

A second body beheaded, a phantom limb pain.
A gunshot wound to a chest that belonged to you and you only,
yet still wasn’t yours.

Every intensive surgery, every attempt to erase it all is wasted,
A pathetic copay to your apathy.

I find myself right back at what I told myself was the end.
What a mockery, isn’t it?
What kind of an end is it if it’s the starting point of my realization that I will never be able to
bury what I like to think of as dead?