Destination, Wherever.

Yesterday, my professor asked us to write a poem about something/someone we would like to accompany. Given that it is a class about the performance of accompaniment (seeing someone through their journey, wherever and whatever that may be), I wrote a poem about accompanying someone to the afterworld. I see afterworld/afterlife as a state of being and an actual place. We are sometimes divorced from things in our lives that forces us to start anew, and that can be an afterworld/life. Death is of course a transition to somewhere that many of us cannot see yet, but that is also an afterlife/world. I hope you enjoy the poem below:

I'd rather you take my hand and urge me in the direction you want to go

Rather than give me a piece of paper, plastic, or anything else that "proves" you're here and you belong

You'd pay me nothing and it would cost you nothing

I'd show you between here and there and everywhere

This would take as long as you needed, and as wide as you'd want to go

Distance is constructed

Time is constructed

Your journey is not

We'd be formless if you'd like

Always already changing (past, present, future)

We'd glow with admiration and shiver with uncontainable excitement

We'd see the land that everyone talked about as being "promised"

The lush greens, blues, pinks, purple, oranges, yellows would coat the skies and underpasses

The lush blacks and browns would shape our bodies in the book of forever

We'd smile to each other and feel immortal

At the end of our time, as we feel it rather than know it because time is in our body and not a gadget we put on it

I'd let go of your hand you'd move how you saw fit

I'd go back for others that you hold dear

I'd bring them directly to you

We'd part and I'd cry tears, overflowing and flooded with memory

Not because you weren't mine

But because you finally found what was yours to have.