Her Father Is Dead and Today Is His Birthday

I send best wishes to your ashes,
flowers with bowed heads are no comfort,
because I feel nothing on this day, every year.
There is happiness in the days before,
then hangovers,
then nothing.
An emptiness that is taller than you and I,
an endless echo of silence that stalks me from midnight, until the twenty ninth stutters into life,
and it’s not like I haven’t tried to find something else to think about,
to see if the shadows would leave me in peace.
I just never could.