Elegy upon the Death of a Friend

/ D.P. iacet hic tumulatum. Obiit vii.x.mmxviii / 

Here, my greatest friend, embalmed you lie,

Within the words and spaces of my verses,

No noble stone to mark the place you rest

That's hidden somewhere back inside my mind;

And language flows from one who once adored you,

Bereft of one who thought you would remain,

And of another friend that also dwelt

Within the shape you once imprinted on

A giddy and a fragile mind that gazed

Into those eyes that sank those fathoms deep. 

Eternally you lie for me interred,

Two souls that lived within that mortal frame,

The images of which were rarely one,

And yet as one alive within my conscience,

For word and deed were set upon each other,

As day by day, your words began to change,

For all my faults were slowly magnified,

But by what agency, I never knew,

For what I knew was changed and then transfigured,

Demolished as my mind began to fail. 

And, screaming through the nighttime groves I ran,

Beneath a glaring and a staring moon,

As all my certainties became eroded,

And all you did was suddenly diminished

Beneath the spectre of my calumny,

That rose from seeds the first soul sowed one day,

And then became implanted in the other. 

But then, my friend, a death and then another,

Your souls, though twin, died then at once to me,

Amid the rushing of an ocean tempest,

That raged then through your lonely funeral,

One shattered heart that bled for your two souls,

And wandered through the dark abyss you left me,

Towards some warm but unfamiliar light. 

15/10/18

Author's Note

An old lover mistreated me once, and for a long time the experiences I had ate away at my self-confidence, and eventually at my very sanity. That friendship then ended dramatically, and this poem is an elegy for the symbolic death of someone I valued more than myself, and whose symbolic death brought as much real grief as any real, literal death.