The Final Despair

 

 

Reaching the madness of failure

plugged like a mouth stuffed

with a sponge, unable to express

the agony experienced with a outward scream –

curved under pressure to turn in the direction back,

circular damnation. Gifts of grace,

pillaged and gone up in smoke.

 

A child’s every breath was my breath,

joy as yellow as the sun – years of happiness

that meant love was working, that the

mutilated and hanging seekers

had nothing up their sleeves to defeat such truth.

But now,

 

my heart is small, barely beating.

My horse is burning,

racing the fields.

My hopes are maimed,

crushed by senselessness,

helplessness and the feeling

that O – there must be switch,

if I could just find it and lift and set

things aright. But my prayers

billow into the air, head for the abyss.

 

I doubt everything and bottom out

in that emptiness, moving mechanical,

tethered to a trusted routine,

happy only in the peace

of a morning’s solitude.

 

 

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Copyright © 2022 by Allison Grayhurst

amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst

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Published in “Creation and Criticism, Vol. 07” October 2022

http://www.creationandcriticism.com/loss-and-other-poems-by-allison-grayhurst.html

http://www.creationandcriticism.com/_blog/search/tag/Poet

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First published in “Medusa’s Kitchen” July 2022

http://medusaskitchen.blogspot.com/2022/07/that-spider-dancing.html

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You can listen to the poem by clicking below: