Trying to Learn

I promised that I'd never leave you.
Now it's time to say good bye if only for a short time.
Where I am going I cannot take you
Because you won't survive.
I want to try and come back some day.
I need to know you're alive.
So give me the ribbon from your hair to remember days gone by
Because to get to Hell is going to be a long ride.
I'll miss you much, of that be certain.
I'll see you again when I return from behind that curtain...
The curtain of never ending pain.

I will have beaten my past and resurrected my dreams.
I will enjoy the knowledge everything is what it seems.
I will have learned.
So I must go through Hell, and it will be hard.
And though nothing is certain, I will travel through the curtain
And I will see you when I return.
Because then I will have earned, all I have set out to learn.

A.J. Downey
11-04-1998