I love you, Brian.
I miss you, my friend.
I miss you more than any words I could ever put together could tell.
I would have better luck trying to describe heaven and hell,
Or purgatory--or Limbo, though the new Pope said Limbo must go--
Or even to describe the nothingness
Toward which some say we temporally flow--
Than to describe what a wonderful human being you were.
Oh, how I wish you could come back to me!--
And to your other friends--back to this world, and have happiness!
But I suppose, though no one really knows, that will never be.
I want so much to perpetuate your memory,
To keep you alive in the minds and hearts of the living.
Some of them, anyway.
Especially in those who never saw you here;
Never saw you smile, heard you laugh, or shed over Sandra a tear;
Never saw the gusto with which you relished eating,
Or saw the kindness and concern you had for others,
Nor how how well you treated all, even in painful days fleeting:
Always patient, understanding, loving, reaching out, and giving.
My wish to make you come alive to all chokes me with tears,
And seizes my spirit with a sense of my weakness,
And suffuses me with a heart-sickening sense of sad mortality--
And I feel the shrinking of my years--
All of my hope of life it smothers.
I want to bring you into the minds and hearts of others:
Your living, wonderful, beautiful heart and mind--to true reality--
But how can that really be?
Those who knew you too can see
And feel your living reality
In some of my poetry,
And bring you back in their spirits within their living day.
But how can I make you real to those who never knew you?
Even if they believe the superlatives I give you are true,
How can they ever really know you?
Oh my friend, I feel today such deep despair.
I look at all the places you used to be.
Every place we used to go to; and places at home,
Such as your favorite chair.
And I don't see you there.
I wish you could be alive, and live and love life again.
To crack the shackles of so-called sin,
If you are there in some deep bin--
Or rise again this world to bless,
From some strange unknowable nothingness--
Or even break through heaven's dome.
I want to say you are, as once you were;
I want you to be what you used to be,
And not only have been.
I hope God will give you your well-earned good reward;
And I still follow your wishes, always to thank the Lord.

==============================
Written by Michael LP, aka PoetWithCancer
aka (thanks to my dear friend Luna Marie) Mr. Poet
Written on Monday, March 19, 2012  2:17 PM PST
53 degrees F.   Humidity: 32%   Forecast: overcast
Copyright (C) 2012 by Michael LP.  All rights reserved
(Copyrighted for my estate)