The leaving of you

The leaving of you in the cellar
Of this second decade house.
You are left in the cellar,
With the musky memories and graved dreams.
With the stoned loneliness
And with the concrete disappointments.

The leaving of you in the cellar
Saved her.
I hear she is living in the attic now.
The attic is where you can find her.
She is high above
While you are down
Below.

I taught her that.
I watched her walk up those steps after leaving you,
A witness to the leaving of you
In the cellar.

A cellar, paraded with insufferable gloom
And stomach curdling desperation.
I saw her make her way to the dining rooms of disease.
She walked slowly though the living rooms of denial
And the hallway spaces of realization and resentment.

The cellar moans of remorse could still be heard.
Pacing herself in the corners of turning times.


She made her way upstairs,
Her shadow trailing instead of guiding.
Trailing- with fallen battered pieces of the past along the way.
Her defeated thoughts and exhausted ill’s
Surrender to the cotton bedrooms for their final rest.

By the time I saw her reach the attic – she was shinning.
And you, were dying.
Together, you and I watched her grow from a wallflower to an attic sparrow.
Free to fly.

That’s where I found her.
In the attic is where you will find Julia.
You will be found too, left in the cellar.
In the cellar purgatory.
May you stir and toil- with all that atmospheric sorrow,
To the sound of past melancholy dirges.

She will not hear them.
For she is high.
High on life in the attic.
While you lie low.

The leaving of you.

-JMR