.

As My Blindness Burns

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Without these things

of rainbow and insight

I stand, fragmented

by despair, fleeting as daylight,

composed of failed hopes

and held-back tears.

 

Young, like truth is

when first found,

are the swollen joys

of new understandings.

And secret still is

the unsculpted future

that rises unexpected without

resolution.

 

The muses of this universe hold faith

and doubt equally

in their impregnated beams,

and me with my hideous cowardice

that grows stronger with age, hides

the things that challenge

and direct me to an edge, ignoring the

simple surrender needed

to grow and to deeply be

someone.

 

This city sobs

when hearing its own wind die,

takes in its industrious hands

the sluggish and the bitter.

 

And the few who rebuke

this smog-breathing serpent

lean depleted in each other’s arms,

hoping to embody something beyond

the world or melancholic pain.

 

And here, wanting, each slave is born, each

mistrust upheld like a perfected attitude.

 

People hold conviction without vision,

walking the subway floors, staring

out to empty highways.

Stale are the nutrients of each wished-on star.

Stale ambition bleating into

each small ear.

 

Lament now the corpses in caverns,

in parades and family restaurants.

Lament the eclipsed beauty of impulse,

the restraint of every compelling break-a-way.

 

For just one hope to tread behind

Jesus’ sandal, freeze,

then crack all chains.

 

I would delight

in the struggles of individuals

conquering the downcast clouds

that hinder and fill a soul

with stagnant woe.

 

But like I am, sick with human

needs, political and ungenerous, I face

the storms and hide my pleas inside the

thunder.

 

Naked, lovers divulge

their infinite shades. Lovers

lean like dried up trees against

an autumn’s ground, lean

for mercy and for each

affection denied.

 

But love they do

in the wintry airs

trying to overcome

personality, imbedded habits,

each other’s foreign sphere.

 

I am pale, forgetful,

I lie awake all night taken down,

breathing the vaporous stench of

decay, in nightmares,

while kneeling before

the brightest flower.

 

I watch you thinning,

keeping

my anguish private,

for none will accept my five open

senses, the reasons for my withered will.

 

I cannot embrace my interior

with humble affection, but must

know the labyrinth’s breathing tide;

mysteries renounced, complexities explained

by pensive reason.

 

Where I sit, seeking the inaccessible cure,

madness comes to kill through dissection,

definition and spiritual systems decreed.

 

In water I am numb,

drifting dazed through dark

androgynous waves.

 

I think of whispering to your waiting grave,

of netting grief and memory,

starving each of their sustenance

blind.

 

But then alone, in death, in life,

connection is our bread,

our higher air that beckons and repairs

the cracks that would kill on

tougher days.

 

How long to hold you in this sandpit sinking?

How long to watch your unwilling heart fade?

 

That I am through with annihilating snares

Through with the brutes of cold consuming despair

 

Through your life yielding to

sudden disease, through the closed door

that echoes strong sighs like screams

down corridors of love’s

last stroke . . .

 

Longing for nether fields,

I want to run

in these subterranean, primal places, want

limbs of fire, eternally

red and dancing over the waking darkness.

I want to seal you

                                               

into the living Divine.

 

I am suspended, believing

the horror will not come, believing

death will not make

a skeleton out of you.

.

 

Copyright © 1997 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

 

.First published in “Poetry Life & Times” September 2015

http://www.artvilla.com/plt/as-my-blindness-burns-a-poem-by-allison-grayhurst/

http://paper.li/shadowspoetry/poets?edition_id=e8653240-64c1-11e5-b73c-002590a5ba2d#!tag-poetry

http://paper.li/shadowspoetry/poets?edition_id=e8653240-64c1-11e5-b73c-002590a5ba2d#!tag-poem

http://paper.li/pinkyandrexa/1321389290#!art_entertainment

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:

(Part 1)

(Part 2)

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“Allison Grayhurst intertwines a potent spirituality throughout her work so that each poem is not simply a statement or observation, but a revelation that demands the reader’s personal involvement. Grayhurst’s poetic genius is profound and evident. Her voice is uniquely authentic, undeniable in its dignified vulnerability as it is in its significance,” Kyp Harness, singer/songwriter, author.

“Allison Grayhurst’s poems are like cathedrals witnessing and articulating in unflinching graphic detail the gritty angst and grief of life, while taking it to rare clarity, calm and comfort. Grayhurst’s work is haunting, majestic and cleansing, often leaving one breathless in the wake of its intelligence, hope, faith and love amidst the muck of life. Many of Allison Grayhurst’s poems are simply masterpieces. Grayhurst’s poetry is a lighthouse of intelligent honour… indeed, intelligence rips through her work like white water,” Taylor Jane Green, Registered Spiritual Psychotherapist and author.

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