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What Is A Ghost?

We talk about them all the time. Can we really know them?

What’s a ghost anyway?

What’s it here for?

What does it want?

To haunt?

But what is haunting?

Or is it hunting?

to frighten?

White-robed, anonymous, like the Klan, malevolent?

to hurt us?

to warn us?

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To protect, guide, keep loving? to return, to observe, to criticize?

to stay because it doesn’t want to leave?

to guide, to reveal what it has discovered, to make amends?

to forgive you or to ask for your forgiveness?

to keep talking because it misses you?

transparent, elusive, shifting and gliding here then there

shrouded in something filmy, flowing, diaphanous, draped in stars?

An angel?

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because it needs to tell you something important?

because it needs you?

because it needs you?

because it wants to take care of you, because it loves you, wants to keep loving you?

because it wants to not be a ghost, to be alive again, to stay with you, stay with you, stay with you, tell you it didn’t want to die, didn’t mean it, never wanted to leave you? Is waiting for you?

Or

to torment you? to remind you of the pain, repeating the same terrible litany of words that rejected you, to taunt you with them till they consume you?

to tell you what to do?

to force the impossible, like Claudius: kill the usurper? Act.

choose now:

Be who you are not. Act.

to drive you mad?

to make promises?

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My ghost wears a plaid shirt and jeans, her hands are rough nails bitten

She hands me a joint and smiles as she drifts around me

But her eyes shift sideways

never meeting mine

Is this just ghosting?

The same old ghosting you dealt with every day?

Or

Is it benevolent?

Or

Is it only what you want it to be?

Is it real?

Is it Itself?

Or

Have you birthed it out of your own longing?

Photo by Photos_frompasttofuture on Unsplash

Oh, Ghost, my Ghost, is it You?

Is it You?

Are You there?

Are you waiting for me?