I'll say it's a success that I'm still around and back here posting. It's been a tricky couple of months, and I feel I've had a grinding, life-or-death, confrontation with a lot of things about myself and the skewed way I relate to the rest of the world. Slowly it appears I'm reaching an understanding. Found the energy to write again as well:
A Winter Song
If the hopes and dreams, the chimera of youth,
Could be incarnated in human form,
They would surely lie murdered, naked and frozen,
Stacked like wood forgotten and unmourned
In a field of snow or behind some empty farmhouse.
Victims of starvation, of genocide,
Limbs distorted, empty stomachs bloated,
Scorched by some halfhearted attempt to conceal.
Eyes that give no solace and admit of no other form of being.
No memories, no trace of vitality past.
Did I glimpse the cadavers as I dragged myself by?
I did not touch or even slow my steps,
Driven towards some far island,
Some heavenly abode of sun and sea and peace.
My voice screams, 'They live still',
'They live there still',
Even as the viscous, putrid mud
Rises to my waist, my chest, my chin.
The day shall come when the sun awakens,
Turns this quagmire to green meadows.
Turns the rancid pile to beautiful, wistful memorial.
Dawn now, birdsong built from light
Reluctant carnivores confront the morning
Time to slip from my envelope
And put a face to the pain.
Old face with grey eyes,
Huge anger unconatined by my body so slight.
It's dawn.
Emerge from the shadows and talk today
Please
Talk
There's no place, no personality
No energy.
No naming or knowing
Or just being solid, still, undisputed, given and taken.
I can't make beauty, I just made you
A simulacrum, an incubus
A scared, small child
It's dawn now
And it's your day
Have courage
And take with you my gift
This death song
Giddy with joy.
You will arrive arrayed in blood and flowers
and be declared mad.
But I know, I foresee,
Your emergence a miracle of the Spring,
Wings all new and shiny,
Colours so bright, so vivid,
They shall hurt the eye.
