Michael Linsk is a poet and HOPE Connection group alum.
My wife, lover, friend, soul mate
is no longer a warm, living, breathing part of my life.
Death intervened.
Michael Linsk is a poet and HOPE Connection group alum.
My wife, lover, friend, soul mate
is no longer a warm, living, breathing part of my life.
Death intervened.
A guest came to visit
uninvited
without so much as a knock at the door.
Grief arrived…
bathed in the empty stillness left by an aching absence,
my new companion rests comfortably among reminders of earlier times.
Allowing me freedom to go about creating a new life
but still present when time slows
and the roaring silence fails to fill the gaping void.
I eat dinner standing in the kitchen
Because that’s now what I do
When I sit at the dining room table
I still expect to sit down next to you.
Don Phillipson is a writer who lives in Thousand Oaks. He was a HOPE Group member until October, 2018.
I sit in a darkened theater, beautiful blue velvet curtains, having just
descended, guard the stage.
The curtain has just come down after the third act, and I sit stunned, dazed.
Five feet tall, forty years old, a steel witness to a life no more. I open the four drawers and pull out the files. Some slim and clean, others heavy, showing their age. They store happy memories of travel around the world, celebrations of birthdays, and anniversaries, the joy of remodeling the house, receipts for various acquisitions, utility bills and bank…
When the dead return they will come to you in dream and in waking, will be the bird knocking, knocking against glass, seeking a way in, will masquerade as the wind, its voice made audible by the tongues of leaves, greedily lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue is a turning and returning, the dead will not then nor ever again desert you,…
I exhale. The breath born but a moment ago recedes into the past as I await the next breath to begin. Because every breath is a gateway between past and future, breathing is an ever-present metaphor for the temporal world in which we live. Nature’s patterns proceed in rhythms. Requiring belief in life’s continuity in stark counter-point to the reality of our…
It’s not easy to join a group of strangers, especially when you’re in pain and feeling vulnerable. In a sense, the uncertainty is normal. Don’t these thoughts and feelings sound reasonable? I’m not a group person. I’m different than the people in the group. I don’t want to sit and listen to everyone’s pain! I’m afraid that I’ll cry. I’m a very…
The children tied a blindfold around his head. He was spun around and around, his sense of direction befuddled. He didn’t know which way to turn. Come and play, they call to him. But how? The blindfold obscures all, forcing him to encounter a world infused with uncertainty. So too for me, the loss of my spouse spun my world around leaving…
It has been said we observe life as if walking backwards, a vision of our past in clear focus while our future remains an enigma. Yet, on a path through a forest glen all of our senses are aware. Sunlight warms our skin, sounds and smells emanating from throughout our sphere fill our senses. If we but look we see everything…