Someone I'D Once Known Poem by Dakota Ellerton

She’d come and go through life and death, as the tide that would so often ring in her ears, beneath the sparkling twilight and cluster of moon and stars, that would shine and shine happily upon the simple tears she’d shed, night and night again.

Base and stability were lost in death, slipping through her fingers, as if weaved through time and time itself was to condem and commit her to sanity and delusion, loss of purpose and discrection would bruise and beat her flesh, to vanish and not be missed nor seen, because of a lie she’d spin too far to live.

I watched as she was loved and loved, the nights she’d lay and shake with medication encoding into her system to die to die to die, as she smelled of alcohol and vomit, too helpless to stop the hands that’d touch her, or to control her own.

She’d give and give through right and wrong, of flesh and lips and breasts - not a sound nor complaint, but only sadness had striken her face. She’d wept for all she’d faught and lost, as the world silently moved around her, not float or round but simply there, it moved and passed by her as she sat as still and simple as ever, in never ending shadows that conquered every corner and part to room and street.

Too many times she’d gotten sick, as I watched her body wither to nothing and less - she’d not eat and barely drink, but walk too far and long to collapse to the side of the road, gathering herself in every piece to continue on another hour, as people would pass without a care, she’d go on just the same, another road and tree and rock and bird, everything so similiar and useful to be there for her eyes, and her eyes alone.

So many times she’d waken, in a hospital that was home - needle pricks in half consciences, with vitamins mixed in apple sauce, coincidently too awkward to take pill formed substitutes, the same blue and grey gowns to drape over nakedly flesh and bone, to hide and cover bruises and scars too deep not to worry, with withering body and soul to discover, it was nearly sicken. Only on her last visit home, she never got to leave.