Bury Your Dead

Or they'll keep coming back

Image by Alexander Krivitskiy.

Old Friend - Linda Kowalchek

“Let’s get together,” you say.
A request loaded like a gun filled with buckshot.
A suggestion to spray my heart with
Shiny daggers fashioned from stale memories.

You call on me to revisit my past,
A dark hole in the passage of time,
A valley in the pit of my stomach,
A graven minefield in the many wars of my life.

Why am I unable to say, “no?”
A monosyllabic unmistakable
Impediment to your enthusiasm,
My roadblock to your drive down memory lane.

Instead, I lie.
I concoct a convoluted tale
Dripping with excrement only a desperate farmer would use
To fertilize his once fallow field.

You say you understand and that we will meet another time,
An occasion I know will never come,
In a place where the two of us
Will never be.

Months have moved forward
Like a boulder racing down a steep hill.
You are who I used to be,
You exist in my old life.

Hear my invisible footsteps echo through the vacant halls of the past.
Listen to me run far away to my future.
I will return home one day,
But only as a whisper in your dreams.

© Linda Kowalchek 2025

Image by Tazz Vaughn.

The Returned - Edward Swafford

Don’t look back with Orpheus eyes, staring
at us in our revivified glory of golden days
gone but never forgotten (+)
guileless but always forsaken (-)
for the sorry sake of dogmatism and bigotry
yet we, the returned, speak in t-o-n-g-u-e-s
arcane incarnations of aesthete illicit idols

Reincarnations of animalistic carnal faces
recharged from the flame, burning for us
with ulterior underhanded usurping FIRE
of our halcyon history colored with brevity
bravery, and inimical |ill will|
coalescence meets historic conflagration
for you see in me, duplicity deed, trust us?

Abyssal allure, assuaged didactic dead men
mouthed three heinous letters engraved in
red-ribboned shapes on canvasses of virgin
skin and steam, risen and revamped, rogue
redemption sullied our luster (!)
ruination yessssssss — the thrill of the chase
forgotten lust fissions, longing lost sPiRaLs

So, hold our Hades hands and embrace ire
like we felt as foregone conclusions, blood
tainted with bane and bad luck, a luckless
lysergic lascivious legion staring BACK at a
cursed caste, societal stones, hyperbolic (!!)
hedonistic ¿¿double standards¿¿
was our death knell thus the ungodly twin
breathed libidinous life unto us in hushes.

Living twice in
Raven atonement junctures
Born again freedom

© Edward Swafford 2025 - Originally published in Know Thyself, Heal Thyself.

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