Brainstorm
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a diabolical grace ...
dark, deep, warm-black arms of
an endless night wrap me ...
head thrown back in abdication -
arms spread wide in surrender,
falling backward, back, back, onto a
hard dogwood blackness ...
nails of my own stark weakness
fasten my hands to a
weighty tree of terrifying introspection ...
poison saturates my blood,
courses with its curses through the
very vessel my soul inhabits ...
dictates to me by the minutes the
movements of my muscles,
states of my vapid organs, thus ...
responses and emotions, true,
like the visceral, mighty hand of some
morbidly jealous god, squeezing
the true and the good from every last
cell of my being - the strength
and health built by a lifetime of good
habit and task, torn asunder
by a guileful beast - a duplicitous, faceless
monster that I invited in from
wintertide like some pitiful, starving fawn ...
oh, it IS pitiful in its treachery,
and it starves - oh yes, it starves ...
with a hunger for souls and
lives and accomplishments and truth,
and it eats them ALL with a
lust unending, and a ravenous fury,
laughing at you with a Cheshire
grin, your own warm, crimson blood on
its shining, chiseled teeth ...
and while you tremble in horror at
its stark visage, while you
stare transfixed into lifeless black eyes,
the face changes, the abomination
transforms into a beauty so pure and
compelling, that your only
thought and desire and compulsion,
is to drink it in with a kiss as
deep as the Universe itself .. to pour
yourself into it with every
passion and emotion you can scrape
from the ice-flaked walls of
your conscience, to merge with it, join it
in all abandon and care and
affliction, and give yourself whole to the
dim, shadowy vehemence
complete, while the deafening roar of your
own screams and scratchings,
plays a somber requiem, final - a sickly
sweet song ...
of obliteration.
~ 1st Place ~ in the "Brainstorm" Poetry Contest, John Hamilton, Judge & Sponsor.
Copyright © Gregory Richard Barden | Year Posted 2018
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