Without You, George St. Heartbreak Poem by STANLEY PACION

I am sick with watery eyes and my body aches,
I fear I have the flu.
A congestion of the lungs has me coughing constantly.

Insomnia stains my eye sockets;
They look as though charcoal had blackened them.
For the first time in my life,
I look older than my real age.

Years ago, when a child,
I read auguries in the snarled patterns of clouds,
And practiced divination in how snow
Accumulated to subtle differences of height
On the post rails surrounding the corral.
I watched the frozen breath of horses,
Looking for some hope of joy,
But abstracted solely gloom and heartbreak.

Today, desperate and preoccupied,
I try to pick out the future from the way
Antenna wire twists against the white walls,
And runs up and down
Along the molding in my bedroom.
All omens portend a bleak future.

My mind has fallen into a trench,
And, like some foot soldier, I dig a deeper hole,
Hoping to escape an enemy onslaught.

Yet I fear my own defenses, that mud may bury me.

I keep to the apartment all day,
Flipping over playing cards,
Looking for my destiny every time,
A queen of hearts appears from the deck.

It's going okay tonight, not too bad.

'Don't be wearin' that stickpin,
The one with the opal on top.'

I found it rummaging at the swap meet,
And recognize that opals have had the reputation
As harbingers of bad luck, especially
Should one buy the stone for one's own adornment.

My luck isn't very good in the first place.
I don't think me wearing an opal
Changes the outcome of life that much.

No eulogy for this affair of heart.
No photographs left here for me to remember us.

I see no people down the street to witness
Me driving off in the Ford alone.

Rainy and cold outside today,
Happy couples walk the avenues,
Huddling close, tight, one to another.

Your name has been deleted from the speed dial.
It has vanished from my computer screen.

I guess these musings are the closest
It may ever come to a biography of us.

I must wonder if this whole fantastic romance
Does it amount to no more now
Than make-believe, a wild course of my imagining?
Is it a footnote in this big book of my own?

No children will be named for us,
Not that you wanted it anyhow,
The children being named after either you or me.

No admission will ever be charged
For entrance to the home where we once lived,
Spoke ardently of love for one other,
And I attempted verse to celebrate us for the ages.

And despite all the noise coming from the street,
All the appointments I have to keep this evening,
I can only lie on the floor and look to the ceiling.
The light is going out of my eyes.

Some people lust after money.
Others seek a hundred different lovers.
Lots of people crave more than a fair share.

I, I just want you, your love, dear,
And while life goes on without you,
I feel increasingly impoverished.
I have fallen into awful ingratitude.

A grand poverty of spirit besets me.

I exaggerate my mood,
And in a panic I envision a national calamity.
My citizenship revoked, I am a refugee,
Lost to my wife and child and forced to flee home.

I have abandoned my bed and kitchen utensils.

I know it wrong for me to venture
Such outrageous scenarios;
Yet when I sit here alone, I feel
That prayer fails me,
And that in my life today
I am bereft of Succor,
It is as if, God punishes me.