What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.
--Friedrich Nietzsche
Sometimes after midnight, when mad silence
mortars the dark, flashing fragments of her
face before me, shredding all sane defense
to memory’s shrapnel, my lone offer
of prayer dissolving in blackened air
like bone powder in ink, my body sways
from the bed barely more than a corpse, flare
of my Dell’s monitor burning away
those black devils deriding me to die
in my sleep as I dream of her lying
beside me, listening as I reply
to her soft, sad, sighing prelude, trying
to grasp her meaning: “I must leave my friends,”
she whispered. She should have said, “It’s the end.”
Roger Armbrust
October 26, 2007
