Into the end of the bleakest night

 I finally resolved

to shred the remaining memories

of you.

Old photographs

where once you grinned,

I thought in youthful

happiness, but betrayed

by deceit and the chisel of the sneer

of selfish vanity,

all went the way of the vigilant calm

of the machine, cutting with no emotion

through the last few years of never-ending scars.

Then

in silence I found a card, badly written

professing sorrow,

your words scrawled untidily

as if written by conviction

admitting that

you

will do anything to repair our loss

of shared crushed Time.

I pause with the card in shaking clean hands

above the machine…

breath held as I study the decision

of whether to spare the ink

or let it go completely.

Ian D. Hall 2026