thirty

This thirty rings hollow, like the crashing of these waves onto an empty beach. This thirty is mine yes but stripped away from me also, taken along with all the other absences and all the other losses. This thirty is wrapped, muffled in your convenient assumptions, and your careless permission for unforgiveable things to be rendered unto me, again. Again and again this thirty is turned upon itself, unrecognisable in the disgorgement of what should-have-been, false in what was, and yet it was this way and it is. This thirty is mine yes but taken from me also. Did my words cut you? Did they cut you like this misshapen thirty has cut me? Did they stripe upon your skin like this thirty did mine, this thirty and before that others too? This thirty has howled in this listening place, and with many others, and its cries were met with silence, and that too rings hollow on the moaning wind. There is no joy here, only failure. Is the failure mine, or is it merely borne by me? I am torn down by this, again, and no new number of promises will make this better. This thirty was mine but now it is become wrong, like so many other wrongs, and I have forgotten so much and in my forgetting it has been turned to lies. And with those lies only sorrow and all the harrowing hours are wrapped around it and all of my hopeless helpless anguish and I cannot and I cannot do this and I cannot bear this and I cannot I just cannot live this thirty and all the others I cannot.