Residual Love Poem by Chase Gagnon

I can't write about you. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because you're more than a memory to me, and I can still hear the ghost of your love moaning in this little corner of my mind. It excites me, and scares me at the same time because I know it's a residual haunting, and your actual love has flown away to the great beyond into someone else's arms. But what you did while you were here marked the land of my soul forever, and that part of you will never leave. My emotions and hopes flood to this spot of my heart like tourists, hoping to catch a glimpse or a kiss from your beautiful apparition.

I wish I could write you a sonnet, with all the frills and delicate rhymes so I could fold it up and place it on the grave I thought I had buried you in, and put an end to this haunting. But I can't. I've become too hard and I can't put a leash on my emotions. Nothing I ever write will be good enough to get rid of you. I could scorch the land of my mind with gallons of absinthe and light it all on fire with a thousand burning blunts flicked from my fingers, then lay down to shield myself from this mental explosion... only to look up, minutes after the blow and see you wandering between the flames, pushing them aside gently like silk curtains warm with the sun.

I'll probably ask myself “where am I? ” and “who is that beautiful woman? ”.
I'd have no knowledge left of fire, and as I'd go to wrap my arms around your soulless impression from behind... I'd hug nothing but the flames and the smoke exuding from my mind, then fall to the ground and suffocate under the ash that once made up everything I am — my soul and heart and mind that will collapse under the weightless footsteps of a beautiful memory.

But unlike you I'd actually be a ghost, Not a metaphor for one, as you're off in the real world loving and breathing. The world that I haven't set foot in since you left. I can't step back out there, I'm not sure why.