Making a Difference

(To Tissa, for making a difference, and hoping you would continue)

On your forty-first birthday

You tell me

You are worried of leaving the world

Without making a difference

 

And I,

Penchant for the affections

Missing in your voice

Mark the contours of Difference

By my own everyday-terms

Splashing words, convictions

That make little sense to you

Like tears

 

I fear

Our destinies will not allow us

Triumphs beyond mundane glories

 

You casually gaze at the sketch

Of years behind you:

In the long run, nothing makes sense

 

And I stare at the abstract years ahead

As scars blossom inside

In hybrid fluorescence

As Loss yawns in to the

Darkness, spreading

 

***

In my personal tragedy

Trivial, smothering

I forget you once again

Loose conscience in daily workload

Sink into a willful comatose

 

And in your personal tragedy

Poignant, lethal

You slip into intractable coma

Beyond my reach

 

It’s a year of knowing you –

Not knowing you –

A thin cord binding us

Professionally, and beyond –

A connection I could have easily defined

 

Now I have to invent this moment

For myself, beside your bed

Tugging at that amorphous end to lift you

From your slumber

 

With an incomplete invitation:

I have written sentences

That needs your healing

Perfection

 

Is how you make a difference,

I reckon

 

A word in its right place

Lodged deeply in some one’s thoughts

 

~ by inkbeauty on April 14, 2009.