Hereafter.

You're muttering incoherently
Beneath lamplight near the ether
Kerosene drips on your face
Onto your shoulder, then dries, menacingly
Scarring your life.
Comprehension is steep
Your flammable exhale coats my throat in rot.

I'm ingesting your predictions of aged deceit
Dissent,  ruminating.
My predilection for optimism outruns the dissonance
I'm three decades behind you,  engulfed in steam
Proving to the omniscient voyeur
That my convictions will not be waylaid.

Yet here we are, united in psyche
The potency of your yearning begging still to be huffed from the air.
I heed you, albeit at a thick distance;
This tangent is overbearing.
My diligence is anchored to respect, to lead
innocence to clean water
Bearing in mind your warning, yielding not to its contaminants.

Another Sunday walked through yesterday's door,
You breathe in solitude behind the strictest fence.
I'll not ask again for any elaboration on your synonyms.
The stark reminder of your beatless existence flatlined those hopes ages ago.
Instead, I write the ending to the road we paved.
Embellished only by the beauty of my interpretation,  my translation,  my... transgression,
My version of, You.

The flawed perfection of all your testimony
Your bravery in vomiting up the truest of truths will not go unrecognized.
For it is within this gory recanting that I find the better versions of myself,
Fucking the feeble-minded away from my most precious energies.
Engorged by the premise of a lofty demise;
That negativity is a canker that spoils all if fed
And my nurturing existence strikes a tone with far more purpose, than to succumb to that barge of dread.

I hear you.
I heard you.
Resonating long, into the hereafter.