Acoustic Afterlife
Shadows of Loss
In your bare room, a shadow shifts between
the curtains' gentle sway. Your coffee mug
still bears your lipstick's trace—impressions seen
marking the days that time has worn and dug.
Your voice persists in strange acoustics here:
the creaking floorboard's midnight hymn, the tap's
deliberate rhythm, ringing clear,
though seasons pass unmarked by ink or maps.
This spectral weight—your sweater on my chest—
grows heavier with each hollow breath. I walk our
paths where weeds have woven nests,
haunted by steps between both life and death.
Yet in this liminal space between realms,
where clocks stammer and mirrors tire,
I've glimpsed your form when dusk overwhelms,
a presence both familiar and far.
Though chasms widen between us and strand
me in a cosmos scraped of stars,
your resonance still vibrates through this land—
your name inscribed on bone and scars.
— Dean Bowman
About the Work
Author's Note: This poem is an act of quiet haunting. It doesn't announce its grief or reach toward resolution—it lingers. I wasn't interested in closure or catharsis, but in capturing the strange acoustics of absence. What remains when someone is gone isn't silence, but resonance—how it inhabits objects, sounds, light, and breath. The lines move through familiar space rendered unfamiliar by loss, where memory tugs at the edges of the real. Rather than writing about grief, I tried to write from within it.
Inspiration: The poem began with a single image: a coffee mug bearing the trace of someone no longer there. That small, domestic moment opened a doorway. I didn't set out to write about mourning in general, but about how the ordinary becomes spectral. The loss here isn't necessarily recent, but enduring—woven into the fibers of a shared room, the patterns of habit, the way time misbehaves when you're alone with memory. It might have been prompted by an afternoon shadow, a creak in the floorboard, or the kind of silence that feels crowded.
Process: I worked on this piece over several sittings, allowing it to unfurl gradually. The tone had to remain restrained—no dramatic flourishes, no declarations. I revised toward subtlety, seeking emotional clarity without sacrificing ambiguity. Each stanza was drafted as its own pocket of space, then refined to echo and counterbalance the others. The soft rhyme scheme helped tether the form to the emotional architecture. Some images arrived quickly; others came only after walking away and returning. I let the poem breathe over time—because that's what the subject demanded: time, presence, and stillness.
Publication Details
Acoustic Afterlife
Genre: Poetry
Original Title: Echoes of Shadows
Author: Dean Bowman
Original Publication: The Black Veil
Date Published:
Language: en
Format: Online
Dean Bowman
Dean Bowman