With uncertain steps
I emerge at the other end
of loneliness
blinking in the light
poised for life,
for its fragrance and
for its blue-in-greenness,
I’ve been through loneliness
and made it across
life’s tightrope with
neither wings nor
safety net,
faced off with aches
full bodied and red like wine
and fought them off
with my bare hands,
the empty Tuesdays
and the love songs on
the radio whose lyrics
fell on deaf ears of
company I could not keep,
the city noises that
got sucked in the cold
vacuum of space, and
the thirty-five-square-meter
box that contained
my desires while I lay
awake watching rain
through fogged up windows
but somehow loneliness
is not as I thought I
would someday remember it
not as being devoid
of meaning like
the bottom of the bottle,
not as being lost
and guilty, simultaneously
on the grid of dark hours
marred by cheap neon signs,
nor as being haunted
by all the parts
that died at the end
of one-night stands
I remember it now as being
littered with stars
and perhaps there is really
no looking back on
a loneliness preserved:
it collapses around you
as love fills each void
that used to prop up
its existence
and your memories change
and your past
follows suit
Rampant & Golden 
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