It was the wanting that stunned me,
time that broke me apart,
learning life in the space time gave,
amid what I asked for
and what arrived.
The silence that carried stars,
the echo arriving in memory,
the planet of my undoing.
To my peace it was a fascinating
concept, as though reflected in
streaming windowpanes, the look
of others through their own eyes,
a bottle‑imp against an
unapproachable surface, never
able to pierce into timeless
energy—there but never
there, like laundry, like sawdust in
the sunlight, or armloads of wheat
and flowers.
I check into the enclosure of time
familiarizing dreams, the rounded
edges, the lost slants,
celebrating with less conviction
the less you—the cosmic force of
living hopelessly backward into
a past stripped of you, of hearing you
speak—here on this dock of transit—
the stricture of this lighthouse,
shining out toward the stars,
like fire, like diamonds,
like lightning—
they constellate this ache.
Gregory O’Neill, from Seattle, writes reflective, conversational poetry about the canny, uncanny, the obscure within the mundane, the emotional physics of absence. His poetry and prose have appeared in publications that include; The Laurel Review, The Mantis Literary Journal, The Opiate Magazine, Jackdaw Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, San Antonio Review, Route 7 Review, Relief Quarterly, Wordrunner eChapbooks, Four Tulips, New Feathers Anthology, Litbop, Eunoia Review, Paraselene, Words Faire, Zoetic Press, Last Leaves, Gabby & Min’s, and numerous others.