Relic

You can feel the rust, smell it
like a disease,
the smell of abandonment,
a slow withdrawal,

incremental, hardly noticed
day to day, week to week,
but there non the less,
a leaving in disguise,

About this poem

One of the things I have learned in life is that many of us, far more than you would realize, suffer from a sense of having been abandoned somewhere in our lives. True or not, we feel it, and often it is not a dramatic leaving that spawns that feeling, but a slow withdrawal of connection, of love, of soulful sharing.

Like rust, it kills, but we rarely see the murder as the people who abandon us stand close at hand, helpless in their own way.

It’s all very sad.

Tom