When the darkness can have a name
when it can make shapes that look like the people you’ve forgotten
when it wraps a sense of warm isolation
and burns the feeling of loneliness in your skull
leaving raw, fleshy guilt
you can’t hide from it
you must let it blacken your bones and sink into your pores
and rip through you from the inside
bleeding you out until your are a pile of consciousness
and only then can you forgive yourself
and the faces become a smudge in your memory once again
sitting on the shelves of your mind, hidden behind velvet curtains
waiting for the darkness to come again