not in life will i ever forget you
even if i don't see you again
even if all i feel is regret and
a sharp uncontrollable pain

you were elegant, sweet and tender,
you were brilliant, artful and kind,
you were painting deliciously rendered
and a masterpiece of a mind

years and oceans are now between us
years and oceans of time and space
but whatever is here, can see us,
and the memories don't get erased -

how much more can i say that i loved you
how much more than i can feel and see
on a rock at the dawn in the sunrise
a soft cloud of you, shirtless, and me -

thirteen years down the road - why now?
just because it was truer than life
in it, what, who, where and how
are impaled on the end of a knife -

which is sometimes twisting and turning
to wake up what i knew in my mind
to remind me of passion and yearning
and the beauty that was left behind -

you will always be there, won't you, truly?
when i need it, will you not be here?
and the world we have known, won't it fully
in the day, in the night, reappear?

and the splendor we've known and the torment
will it not come back, time and again
to make endlessness of each moment
and a door into truth made of pain -

and the world that we knew, not regretting,
i will come to, in joy or in wrath -
not in life will i ever forget you
nor in death, nor in death, nor in death.

https://sites.google.com/view/ilyashambatpoetry