After

After you die, my years with you
rattle like the last bits of kibble
in the tin bowl of existence.

I stand guard over them
like a starved and brutal thing,
as the most perfect self,
knowing that they, and we, and I
aren't anything but a subtle reshaping of nothing,
the curvature of light around a great mass,
a momentary allusion to color.

You, on the other hand,
were always something.