So Much Left Unsaid Poem by James Cayce

I always knew there'd be a day when all
the laughter in the life we shared would fall
as silent as the seconds after gunshot.
Time would part from space then stop.
Every sound would fade, then drop
into some dark and overwhelming emptiness.
And while the muted world unwound
I would lay your lifeless body down
and at last would have the final word.

That day has come and mercifully gone.
And in its wake new days trundle on
diminished by the sadness that remains.
Heavy days, dull and firmly settled
lifted now and then by an echoed
bark as welcome and familiar as your name.
A bark that brings to mind the strangest day
when in some still confounding way
you tugged me to that rescue you'd devised.

Too smart for eight weeks old, and semi-tough
you knew a Sheltered life was never life enough
for the lonely and the loveless and the lost.
So you stole a helpless heart the way dogs do,
let me tell myself that I chose you
and I was more than happy to believe it.
You knew you cherub-thief, that once I saw
those pleading eyes, that tiny outstretched paw
that we would be where we were meant to be.

So I took you home, watched you play
knowing as I gave my heart away
you'd send it back in pieces when you go.
But a tattered heart's a paltry price to pay
for the wealth of joy you brought me every day
from nothing more than having you around.
It was in that happy optimistic face,
in laughing at the always frenzied pace
of that semaphore you wagged for all to see.
In knowing how you waited at the gate,
fretted like a child if I was late
then announced like some town crier, my return.
In the way you always helped me comprehend
that the love a dog possesses has no end
and is lavished with no demands or expectations.


You believed I held the world aloft
trusted it to me, never bothered by the soft
unsteady shoulders that you saw.
You put me on a pedestal regardless
held me up with virtues I never did possess
and stood me in the warmth of you affection.
And I envied you, that nonchalance with which
you thumbed your nose at Life, outran that bitch
until she figured out how best to hold you down.

But never one to tolerate restraint,
you dragged your legs around without complaint
until the pain of it was more than I could bear.
We knew too well what needed to be done
but you, the stubborn, and me the selfish one,
tried her cold impatience for too long.
But a hero would have offered more than tears
when those eyes that shone so brightly all those years
asked the hardest favour of them all.
We knew too well what needed to be done


So we finally took that awful ride my friend
and you convinced me this was not the end
just one new chapter waiting to be written.
Now, that darkness that we always knew would find us
has left our conversations lingering behind us
with so much still remaining to be said.