Shadows

You always have them,

and they are always more than one,

your shadows being not just you alone

but everyone you knew and loved,

that always will keep following you

with all their memories and yours

of good and tragic, sad and lovely,

vivid just the more for being dead;

for all those shadows of the past

tend to survive the more persistently

and hauntingly for being buried and suppressed.

Your failures and defeats, injustices and wrongs,

frustrations, disappointments, bankruptcies and ruins

are all there as derelict dark palaces decayed

and the more hauntingly alive for the implacability

that you can never kill a ghost.