Now here I begin by telling you I do not have a lot of time and feel the end creep closer and closer carried passed the minutes winding.

What shape will the end take in fact what date and what will it make up the end of. It couldn’t be death coming to call. No that would be relief in a form of addendum.

The shadows stretching    

like phantoms    

to swallow all reflections    

of the day now spent     

carry within them a foul unwelcoming dread.

This is no death aiming for me which I would be running to meet like a long lost brother.

The only real brother I ever would know who took with him every trust and hoped for confidence I ever would hope to find.

This brother of mine I searched for but never could find in all the brothers around me. I call each one my brother but have deficit of confidence so who can I trust if not my brother not this one I call brother but perceives no brother in me. 

I call them all brother but no I have none. He left me long ago.

Please have no sorrow for me but yet if still you find you are now found in this new found sorrow do attempt to suppress and spare us both the awkwardness of expressed condolences for such past tenses.

I stopped mourning this so many score and then some years ago so I implore no further tear be born for this forlorn for if must it be so I witness your sympathetic woe I will surely though be breached.

Please feel no need to share in grief for me because of how deeply I feel every sorrow of every man woman and child we borrow so futile in my wish to wipe every tear and ease every suffering but I Am no Jesus.

Still I’m told this is a precious gift yet it’s a gift for which I never wished for. I’m just a man no I’m so much more of the mess of what’s left of what a man becomes when he comes to possess much less.  

I am but a shadow of the man I always hoped to become but that day has come and left and with its coming to pass now gone too fast slipped opportunity through my fingers on out from my grasp.

With years spent looking back through the abyss living life in the past and now my future as well is left there in the mist how did it come to this.

I added to the list this reason I am now without hope it seems. My hopes and dreams in smithereens and still these enemies I’m calling them brother but not one is my keeper.

If there even was one then it would surprise me but that one is long gone and there’s nothing new under the blistering sun. I’ve grown weary it tires me.  AimlessI walk through this desert it’s all I see at both sides in front and behind me.

Who can be found trustworthy but these shadows in bloom reaching out to consume me. Dare I say that this feeling of dread impending be a better ending than feeling nothing instead.

There is no sorrow in loss when to loss I come home and lay my head. No disappointment in knowing you’ll only ever be knowing you know you will be let down.

No joy in a landscape where nothing new grows having painted every blade and leaf winter snow every shade of each season.

All gone by this time is why I can paint this unchanging scene in each change in season I can do this by dark but in darkness there is no color.

There are no birds and no sky to behold. I am young but I’m old having walked all these thousands of years and I walk with my brothers.

And I pull them to safety and out of a rut yet not one sees a brother in need when I needed a brother but my brother is gone where was I ? when he needed his brother?