The feeling never really goes away.

A busy, distracted life has its advantages. When you wake up with a list of things to do in your head, and go through the day right up until bedtime with always the “next thing” top of mind, the feeling sits off to the side patiently, like a lonely customer at a busy restaurant waiting for a table.

Eventually, that customer’s time comes, and you find yourself seated with the feeling that you are always trying to avoid.

The feeling doesn’t really have a name. It is wide and dark, like November, it is tall and cold, like an iron gate in the snow. It feels like 3AM when you can’t sleep, like being in a waiting room at a hospital. It is a feeling that defies classification, defies identification, and only allows itself to be felt, not verbalized.

The sorrows we carry are bigger than we are, yet somehow exist inside us, carrying with us the broken bits of what we used to be — of what we can no longer be.

And we sit, staring at a feeling whose name we do not know, but who knows ours only too well.

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awash out on the lonely yard a gaze -- 
november haze and ice and hidden rue; 
to do another thing is meritless, 
and spiritless, a shadow made of doubt 

we do not think so much as feign we think, 
and drink from sorrow's glass, and sink within 
the din from our past lives, in endless loop, 
a group of imaged truths, no longer 

true

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