Stasis 2

I refer you to the stub I filed on the first of December, 2009 – Stasis.

After watching Sherlock – The Reichenbach Fall tonight, I was overcome with melancholy (credits to Moffat and Gatiss for breaking my tender fangirly heart with such a beautifully painful end to the second season). And we all know melancholy never bodes well for me. That, and the fact that I am up to my neck with a new cocktail of drugs for my recent sinus infection and the return (with a vengeance) of my chronic gastric pain, almost certainly equates to a mental turmoil that needs be released into poetry a la bloodletting.

It got me thinking back on these couple of years, and evaluating my progression out of the past and into the future. This new poem is the result of such soul-searching. I took a stub and expanded it in similar fashion to Blowing Bubbles, but this one had more autonomy in rebirthing itself into something quite different.

As a disclaimer (for all those who might read negatively into this, if I have readers at all), I am okay. I wrote this not in a spirit of regression into a past that has no future, but an acknowledgement of the fact that I will never truly be free of what I try to escape via burial.

Credits go to Manda for the fabric image.

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STASIS

I buried you
Deep within the flesh of the earth
Dug out with my own bloodied hands;
Watched the clay bleed under my tears
As I resigned myself to the you-shaped
Wound to decay out of sight.

I buried all memorabilia
Deep within the recesses of my mind,
In a coffin fashioned from scrap
Pieces of empty cardboard husks,
And left it to yellow and perish
At the persistence of time and mould.

I heaped the dirt of each new day
Over the ruins of a time long past;
Flooded the earth with each teardrop
And prayed not for the dove
But the halcyon’s visitation to calm,
Mirror-like, the scourge of my soul.

I grew flowers -
Entire new hopeful civilisations
As I learned to write new paths
On the clay canvas; painted over
The red scar with fresh green facades
Of smiling grass and fallen leaves, but alas

The earth that I have lovingly cultivated has caved in
Under its own weight, revealing the large
Gaping hole
In which your flesh once occupied – now it is no more
Than a harmless skeleton of a prior existence. Yet
You continue to haunt me, a ghost of a memory,
Perfect and transcendent, untouchable by time,
And I am caught in this constant re-enactment
Of history; the story of you and me that I have covered
With the dust of lies and deceit.

It is I
Who has been buried under the illusion of convalescence,
Shamelessly trying to bleach the stain of your glorified image
From the unworthy fabric of my memory. But
I made the mistake of interring you within my flesh,
Realising only too late that, until its destruction,
There the silence of your absence shall forever remain
As the reminder of my mortal pain
And, as we are bound by four walls and a key-less door,
So am I jailed in the coffin of dusty memories,
Condemned to repeat, endlessly, this journeying
Between past woe and present day,
With no compass but the reflection
Of my own tragedy
In the mirror of my writing.

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God, I think I talk to myself too much.

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