"how two astronomical bodies may break up: a ghost story sequel."

sequels to ghost stories 
always have 
that one little boy who learned his lesson 
after it was presumably too late 
but he redeems himself 
after that someone else might 
learn from his mistake 
as they make it on their own.,

he may have wanted to
be the flowers on his mother's grave,
or whisper on a prettier boy's neck
on a crisp night
that breaks the summer heat
for the winter to come,
but he was always wrong
and that is how we come to the ghosts.
We expect that
what comes after
must be the impression of
what came before,
that we might not finish
what we started
will become another's problem,
and how we treat the ones we should love
will determine how we see them
again and again.

Sequels to ghost stories 
always tell us
something else had happened
or was missing,
but they don't expect us
to read into that.
The narrative is supposed to make us
feel what's not there
or else tells us it was missing.

I want to write a ghost story sequel
about how ghosts can't see one another
in ways that even the living don't:
a concerned look
might be the windows shatter,
loneliness expressed as a tub flooding over,
and mourning the murder-suicide
of a wife & husband
means the chairs are thrown
across the room,
but each time the paranormal occurs
to itself
it is
as quickly explained away
by science,
by common sense,
by another moment
silenced by the arrival
of another moment.
I think that my ghost story sequel
would be about how lonely it is
to live with your mistakes
and in the end I would teach someone
what those mistakes are 

and then I could move on
to sharing everything I did right 
and how that makes other people
wrong.