One More Walk On The Lake With You

There is a focus now on bass notes, a certain way they echo. I remember everything, despite a thousand reasons not to. Memory crushes the present, the way an open palm can crush insects or smiles. Trust is not the issue, until it is, and then it's all there is. You see where this is going?

You wrote towards the end that our lies had become like renegade soldiers, always gathering in the distance, ready to storm our meager shelter. I remember in Burlington a dog with a red bandanna that I tried unsuccessfully to rescue, the sense of hope and promise inherent in any loneliness. Death is the end, don't kid yourself. I wake and go walking in the darkness, attended only by the devil and his now-familiar longing. Oh how I wish I could start my life again.

We are perhaps one, perhaps not. He fed himself a crust of bread and watched the sun fall beyond gray hills. Voices of children in the street, witnesses to hunger and political failure. Followers of the executed criminal persisted their damning testimony. I braved the gallows but for what?

Did I mention dishonesty? Broken thoughts that fall from my tongue like windows out of long-abandoned factories? You left, you did not come back - what is death against that? The end is coming, brother, and it's going to feel like being drunk in a snowbank on Christmas. I would trade every prayer I've uttered and every hint of God I've written for one more kiss, one more walk on the lake with you.