Can the living grieve for their lives?
A forgotten door now firmly shut
Suddenly your skies have limits
Worn from walking this far
Halt
Curtain call
You are not invincible
We are not forever
Not everything is possible
The fragility of opportunity, it trembles at the touch
A fairy’s wing against a window pane
Breathtaking to catch, a treasure to attain
Compare it to banality
The sprinkling dust of hope
- it makes you sneeze
Shut your eyes
Your nose is raw
Gleaming gold
Glowing fists
Smooth
Streamlined
Success
Phelps beat his own record
All at once
You are your only competitor
Now or never
Else in the future
Which is really just as bad
Milestones to reach, mountains to climb
Jagged rock leads to open knees, spilling freely down the sides
Stand at the top in front ahead
Your guts in a squishy heap
Swimming in the waters below
If you’re lucky
It could have been your soul
Extinguished by your very own roughened palm crushed between calloused finger tips
In exchange for weathered stone smooth as success heaving you to the top
What do we do after we seek and we find and succeed? Seek the ultimate, the endless, the internal, the impossible
Thoughts are leaping into my head,
Landing badly like car crash victims
Smashed and squelched and slapped against my skull
Seeping badly. Seeping fast.
‘til I cannot read, they are no longer there and I have only the sense of an elusive truth missed
A message never conveyed or even processed
Vivid
Vibrant
You bathe in it, hide in it, sink into it with no explanations
Embrace by day or postpone it
They are rich in quality
Sometimes
The multicoloured glory of an array of fireworks
The flickering transformation of a black and white TV
They can lick your wounds, soothe your ego, feed your desire, drive you to the foot and fly over that mountain, sacrificing nothing, beholden to none
Or leave you shrunken, Old Mad Broken
Rocking in a chair. Sitting on the floor.
Stooped in despair.
Bottles are your friends. Rain that old enemy.
The bed a sinister comfort
The outside a needless truth
Jingling of money. Clank of an award. Smear of a sticky kiss. Beam of a secret smile.
Dancing alone. Bowing amidst applause.
In a darkened room, the truth is nought but yours
Yellow. Yellow. Yellow.
Yellow-Gold
Goldy-Yellow
Gold
Yellowy-Gold
Yellowy-Green
Green. Green. Green.
Sticky-Green
Sickly-Green
Bitter-Green
Lone. Lone. Lone.
Suddenly I loathe everyone.
You too.
