wrapped up in your cancer

I wrote this quickly last night when I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about some random things going on in my family right now and I just started free writing random thoughts that were popping into my head:

blink once
time is gone
and life disappears
faster every second
fractions
of seconds
fade faster every day
life escapes
each breath
turns to crystal and shatters
into another lost moment

And then, because I'm a huge loser, I scrawled this in the margin: So hold on to the ones who really care, cause in the end they'll be the only ones there.
Geezus.

Moral of the story is, here's the actual poem that came out of this nonsense:

The air freezes with each breath I take
And hangs inches from my nose
Before shattering into another lost moment,
Out of my reach,
Impervious to my fingertips.
And the deepest corners of my mind
Struggle to retain any piece of the lost second
Preserving it with always fading clarity.

Sometimes late at night
These moments become clear
And I can lean forward,
And touch the tip of my nose to their icy exterior,
Gazing with an insomniac's blurry eyes
At what once was
What could have been
Or what I want to take back
But each time I move closer,
I can feel the water sliding down my cheeks
As each second moves away,
Returning to the ground and to the air
Until the clouds open and they pour down on me
A storm of the past, of what I can never have back
And what I failed to hold on to.