Wanderings
Sitting here late on a winter night
I’m wondering about fate and things
If a life can pass by unlived, in a blink
If there will ever be peace on earth.
I used to see the stars, my gaze unhindered
But that was before the coming of her
The nocturnal lover of obsidian smoke
Turning my senses numb and my focus dim.
My view isn’t so clear these nights
Obscured by sheets of murk and mist
There’s light up there, my eyes strain to see
While the road before me sinks ever deeper.
I think I’m walking on moondust, but
My feet just get sucked into sandy pits
I’m dreaming of grand Arabian nights
Only to lose myself among endless, dusty drifts.
Pools of crystalline waters I pass right and left
But no refreshment awaits my sagging soul
A lingering, skeletal, shadowy presence is
The only companion afforded to me.
Peeling tired lids, I study the shades of gray
A heavy ombre curtain poised to be drawn
Like an ominous foreshadowing, it hangs
A fractal fringe of delicate crystal ice.
In a tensely unaffected state, I wait
To spring at leaking slivers of starlight
To snatch them in my trembling hands
Before they dangle and drop away.
A door ajar here, over there a window
Every crevice and crack, a mental catalog
Each one analyzed, queried: is this the one
To end the suffering of an immortal vagabond?
The light I cling to, my final hope, the sole
Preserver of my fractured sanity, the barest
Wisps taunting and teasing until I long
To become a subtle defector of the night.
Faintly, my ears detect voices of celestial beings
The gentle melody of a realm unblemished
A star beams clear, a pure undiluted strain
Promising relief for this desiccated, fissured clay.
Whether peace lies there, I hardly care, I
Only know the life I lead is not for me, and so
I scrape at the muck, the haze in my eyes
My only thought to follow that star.
A song of hope descends, softly crooning
A fleet of luminaries, messengers from afar
I wend through columns of Elysian heights
Voyaging across seas of somniloquence.
The shadow grows weaker, black smoke thinner,
The nearer I draw to that burning flame
Soon, I hope the dusk flees to never return
As long as I hold claim to the beacon divine.
It’s strange to think, but I never realized
Just how dark the shadows are, until
I breathed in the crisp flow of moonlight and felt
As it infiltrated the depths of my wanderings.
*****