Where are you?

Where are you wand’ring and where did you go?
Why have you gone so soon? A brief moment
among the living, never seeing daylight.
And now, forever closed, your eyes milky
and gray, not ever opened by your will.
Where are you wand’ring? Under some distant
alien sun? Or by the moon’s pale light?
Perhaps you linger down among the great
multitudes under the pall of the dead.
Or do you walk an endless road between
the serried cypresses that nod in time?
Have you come back to us across Lethe’s
dark banks or yet wait, only to return
long years hence when I have joined that dim herd?
Do you exist only in my black mind
as firing charges of memory, as
mere flashes bursting in the inky black
illuminating the ghosts of the past?
My boy, where are you? Who have you become?
What do you want or need? Do you have dreams
or do you dream forever only in
my mind, to be extinguished when I die?
Not while I hope a selfish hope, a fool’s,
a hopeless hope to see you once more though
you have gone where I cannot follow, where
one day when time has turned to dust I will
find you and you will open your new eyes
and I will see the light within and know
you, where imagination dwells and gives
false hope to the anguished and the hopeless,
like honey on the bitter cup of life.