Alienation

Stop for a moment, wounded warrior

Feel your pain.

In a short time it will fade from awareness

Though not from your being.

The wound is deep. It will not heal.

It will never heal because it's a wound of stolen time.

Forget all that bullshit about “lost-time alien abductions,”

Your time was stolen by someone who once swore she loved you.

Forget all that bullshit about defining what love is.

Your pain tells you what love is.

No surgeon’s jargon will ever describe your wound.

I know what it is. I have two of my own, a daughter, a son.

You will never find words to describe the pain.

None of us do. It is enough that we know.

When I see a soldier standing over a fallen comrade’s grave

There is a sense that he or she knows the pain of stolen time.

Yet a subtle whisper hints this isn’t quite so.

When I see a parent standing over a grave of his or her child

Affinity moves me.

We share something, like spheres of fog that merge at edges,

Not quite becoming a single cloud, blending along the surface.

That parent knows what we know through one’s child’s death.

It is not the same, those who witness a child wasted

By drugs or disease, or sudden tragic death.

Death steals that child’s life. There is no time left.

We know what stolen time is. As with all time

It will never be recovered, as clocks move with the sun,

Crossing space never to be crossed again.

Forget wailing to deaf ears.

The din raised only brings annoyed, condescending sympathy,

Or pity. You are alone.

You are alone in your anger and your grief over your child’s time

With you stolen from each of you.

Let your pain give you strength, and courage.

That will be needed as you lose your will to live, or face the temptation

To immolate yourself, or use a bullet to find the hole in your heart

Left in place of your son, your daughter.

I have known some who have fallen this way, a bullet, in flames.

And, yes, I have lain within that bleak darkness, ready to let go,

Willing to succumb to a freezing numbness that brings death.

Time that your child needs to spend with you is stolen from you both.

That time is gone. You know that child lives with the same acute pain we know,

Pain we live every day.

So live every day to heal your child’s wounds as only you can.