My Torment Is Private

My torment is private

And with the passing of the years

Becomes increasingly taciturn

And sternly bereft of easy feeling

Or stony seeming moods simply described

My only friends remaining

A long line of shuffling ghosts

Who visit nightly in my dreams

And play tom-foolery upon half-forgotten memories

Making of friendship

A fickle, fragile thing

Hard won and easily lost

Names and faces of myself

Spread over many years and distant places

Now just feint residual traces of strange feelings

Lost between the spaces of my empty room

Waiting to be filled in once again

With yet newer faces and new places

And then soon covered over once more

And death I fear not, nor loss

For loss follows always upon the heals of happiness

And without death, there would be no life

And it is the price we must eventually pay

For the brief moments we walk on earth

It is only the emptiness and silence

Of what is leftover from life

And the ultimate loneliness

That awaits us in the grave