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A Thousand Miles from Your Bedside
I’ve watched you lose life
in measures I cannot grasp.
Distance was the only way to escape
the time loop back to my origin story.
I’d like to say I travelled
to reinvent myself
though I know I just wanted a reason
to not be the one closing your eyes.
They are emissaries from your conscience;
I fear the contradictions they carry.
I have spent my years pursuing an unreachable remoteness,
knowing my life has been yours to roam through
like a mother tasting her own poisoned milk.
While I cower beneath a son’s first day at school,
a daughter’s graduation party, I can feel those eyes
fumbling their ways softly across my face,
lighting a wick beneath the chiselled brow
they cannot read.
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About the Author: Imran Boe Khan has work appearing in places such as the Rumpus, Sixth Finch, Cosmonauts Avenue, Yes, Poetry, and The Bitter Oleander. A previous winner of the Thomas Hardy Prize, Imran is a lecturer at Bournemouth University, and lives in Christchurch, Dorset.
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Image Credit: Broncia Koller-Pinell “A Bedroom Interior” (1895) Public Domain
As It Ought To Be 