My Beloved Friend? Poem by Maurice Harris

My beloved friend? Yes, well until I need you the most-
Now you are naught more than a ghost,
Haunting my subconscious mind, with all we used to be;
We are now estranged, because you refuse to see,
Or rather, recognize, that with friendship, comes empathy-
To ignore my plight, you ignore my reality-
I do not ask for your sorrow, nor do I want sympathy,
Just choose one side, not this duality!

I may not just pretend that 'this' is not real;
Of course, as your surreptitious friend,
How much loyalty toward me do you really feel
When I am allowed to fleet, like the wind
For more than a year, with not a single word from you! ?
If you cared as I thought, why have I not heard from you?
You are my very own irresistible enigma,
Yet, I am caught in a place rife with stigma,
With which you are apparently not equipped to deal;
In its stead, you allow circumstance to further steal
Away, our inspired amity, our all-too-real emotion;
Where is the loyalty, what happened to devotion?
Am I alone in wonder, have you no concern for me?
Are you not my friend, or is this something you must, again, learn, to be?
I had only just 'rediscovered' you, then you vanished-
A love I had missed my whole life, has been banished,
To collect dust, as part of your 'former friends pile';
Though, here I am, yearning all the while
For my dear, beloved friend, now gone from me!
It is as though I lost a member of my own family-
May heart aches each day, in the face of this tragedy!
The last thing I needed was for you to run from me,
After all I have been, and continue to go, through!
I needed the love you profess to have, to show through!
Come back, and I promise to never tell you how hurt I was,
When I realized my friend was gone again-
But this time, I insist upon full disclosure, because,
If you love someone, you do not secret them away like a sin;
You celebrate what they mean to you, and contrariwise;
This is my foremost wish, for our reprise-
That, and to allow that we love, without bound,
Whether or not I happen to be, around!