Oh, play pretend

Lynn Greyling

Oh play pretend - damn the demanding

silence – Come back and play pretend.

Send flying verses over my head folded

like paper air-planes holding your secret

inscriptions to me– your patient progeny –

Oh play, play, play pretend and banish the

capped stench of grief and death alive under

the scars – stanch the scarlet river running 
beneath protestations of healing – Feverish, 
infected with yearning - I cry under my calm 
coolness of fabricated, fatuous, “moving on” –

Please! 

If I cannot have you back –

and I can not have you back–

Oh play pretend! 

I have waited five and twenty years now since

footsteps echoed from your shoes rather than

walking throughout my heart, my mind, my soul.    

Oh play pretend and for just one moment – Live.