Goodbye...For Now

What’s goodbye?
A capitulation or an enticement?
A cessation of breathing or a struggling pause?
A comma or an exclamation point?

Various responses suffocate
the growing magnitude of its certainty.
A goodbye is not short-lived, rather
it is an ice age.

So, goodbye to what?
An apple core,
Or just a soul,
Or a speck of dust
settled across the back
of a butter bar.

This goodbye, I say
restraining a tear,
is an antediluvian struggle
for survival.