All You Loved are Dead, All You Needed is Left Behind

Yesterday I heard you cry
and you wished you were dead.
When I asked you why,
you reminded me how you travelled
all the way from Geneva
to Karachi.

What, for something you imagined
and something you hoped for,
partly, which was such a yearning
as you had never known before?
but if you'd asked me
I would've told you.

All those I loved are dead
and all that I needed is left behind.

You're neither here nor there.
Isn't it the way I am?
Something I explained to you
last year when we had a late night talk.
You tried to suppress those tears
but they just wouldn't listen to you anymore.

You said I was kindred.
I don't know.
To know you as in a mirror
is fear.
The fear that you are there,
failed like me.

All those I loved are dead
and all that I needed is left behind.

When I was younger
my mother told me how people
laugh when you laugh
but don't cry with you.
But in misery, all is one,
now there's no one.

What more could I have told you?
Consoled you? Hold you?
There's nothing in me
unless you accept dustbunnies
of undead love.
You heard me right.

All those I loved are dead
and all that I needed is left behind.

You're repeated and repeated
through me, through you
through all of us.
You come back to remind me of misery.
Misery, I have embraced;
you, not so much, anymore.

Because in my heart is
such a violence that I never
knew was there before.
How I've seen the sky darken and cry.
I hurt when I lost my faith
I won't deny.

All those I loved are dead
and all that I needed is left behind.

I met you even years ago.
Sitting there in the cold darkness, laying tears
on dying embers
of the worst barbecue in history.
So I hugged you but I wasn't a man.
I still wonder what you want from me.

This dead body still wants to commend you
for reminding how it lost its battles,
again and again and again and again.
This is a game, I told you, there are no
winnings, so don't come to me.
Death is beating in me, here you are again.

All those I loved are dead
and all that I needed is left behind.

If you want your wounds to be
scratched deeper than they are,
why come to me when
the lotus of love is still blooming inside.
You're worshipping death on the side,
just in case.

Don't come over to my side
and tell me I'm your mirror;
when yearnings are still burning your insides.
If you're still thirsty
don't ask, I'm only a desert,
it's only a mirage.