You were on-the-go, in the know,

I am "Where to go? What to know?

If you were yang, I am yin. 

Now, you are gone and I am only yin--

blackness.

I miss your company, but to revive you is to kill me,

for we cannot co-exist:

we are mutually exclusive.

You shut me out, 

and I return the favor.

We couldn't help it; the Universe forced our hands.

I was you, but you were never me. 

And you never will be.

You never can be.

For you are in that black box known as Past,

that inescapable Prison,

which knows no Time,

but which Time certainly knows.

But you are not alone.

With each passing second,

that inhospitable, unforgiving warden, Time,

remands another part of me to bring to you.

With each passing second,

I die and grow a little lesser,

so you can live and grow a little greater.

This is where I am disadvantaged:

though you can never be me--

the warden never sets any prisoners free--

you can have me, and in due time,

probably by the end of this poem, 

you will.

I can only be me; I cannot have me.

You even have a "You" of your own.

Which makes you "Me". 

And it "You". 

So you understand, "Me".

Yes, you understand me.

Very faintly, now, I hear someone calling my name. 

He is summoning me to appear in the Court of "Justice".

But, is it so just to earn its name?

I know already what the verdict is;

it's the same for every wandering soul who finds itself there:

Guilty of living, sentenced to "life" in the Black Box.

So, now, I walk slowly to relish the few moments I have left,

the numerable steps--9, 8, 7,...--

the brief seconds in which I am still dynamic, living, breathing,

able to change and do and be,

not yet condemned to eternal silence.

In the beginning of this poem,

I was stronger, more present.

As I now enter the presence of the "Honorable Justice" Fate,

I am pale and thin,

devoid of all vivacity and capability.

A shadow of who I once was.

Time, that indelibly elusive killer has arrested me.

How I wish I could have turned the tables on him.

But, we cannot arrest Time. No one can.

Not even Time himself.

This we have in common.

Now, after my sentence Fate delivered,

I am no longer me. But I am not you either.

I thought that, in my death, we would become one.

I see now that we are none. 

We are the inanimate bones of a great beast that once lived.

Time, that most efficient of all universal forces,

has surely found a new "Me" by now. One to replace me.

To my replacement, I caution that, though the world has us all eternally--

in the life of today, and then in the everlasting anthologies of history--

none of us can have the world for even a second. 

Fate and Time don't permit us.

The present is fading fast, but the past never dies.

So, make good use of your time now

because you, too, are losing yourself like the sand in an hourglass.

You will one day lose yourself entirely, and then your time and life and influence.

It's only a matter of Time.