Rogue Poem by Erwin Maramat

A fifty megaton smile dropped at the heart of the morning

followed by seismic wave of hydraulic laughter breaking grounds,

and the earth stood still.

Have accrued welts from the lashing of her voice;

a booming thunder;

a crack of a whip tearing and crumpling the silence draped over my sanity.

None to keep, save for memories sewn together as a quilt,

a well-wrought scar used to patch the fissures of the mind to slow down the montages of our time.

I remember when

1440 minutes of every day,

(a countdown to the possible 4,000 weeks based on an unreliable prognosis)

I was a satellite revolving around a life-giving star that is you,

confined to a goldilocks zone to bask underneath your pulsating soul,

Once upon a time,

I planted kisses on your body hoping they could grow into trees and from there grow into dense forests where I can just get lost in your wilderness.

For some reason,

you grew old and with that you grew tired,

bored of the fire that has been burning in the furnace,

bored of being loved, so much that you thought of it as solitary confinement.

Bored.

I have devised plots and I was replete with schemes to make you stay, but staying was never an option.

How I cried to tie down your spirit with a string,

but nothing can hold you back.

You wandered off to some distant land,

to obscurity,

lost in the wilderness of limbo,

while I'm here in the purgatory of my own design.

I was a satellite.

Rogue now to say the least.

Here with me is an empty shell of you,

casting lines into the pools deep-seated in my eyes,

your glassy stares speak of hollowness,

I feel your pulsating heart but it is more of a star that has collapsed.

Visiting hours is up. Until I hold your hands again.

I'll bow my head tonight in prayer just to speak to a scant of who you were.

—Erwin D Maramat/Erwinism