FRO 2012: BWA

I’m not that big of a poetry buff, but this was an incomplete work from a while back. I think it’s rather fitting for this assignment.

 City of Night

An endless horizon, waiting beyond ivory clouds.

The day’s ethereal burdens arcing my head

towards the grasping silken threads.

The world blurs and fades to nothing

but a cloud of fireflies in a windstorm.

The buzzing drone of my thoughts fade,

and the memories come unbidden.

A surging tide of unfelt emotions,

suppressed by time and circumstance,

crash over me and color my vision

the shade of a long lost twilight.

I feel no rising, no falling, no fire, no spark.

Just the flame of my waking burning to embers,

and as it flickers to naught,

my world plunges into the city of night.

A landscape of black

In which I alone walk.

Darkness whispering in my head,

Of memories and regrets.

Of things long buried in the

struggle to keep myself sane.

Of fantasies and daydreams,

Of impossible hopes that write the script

for the performance of everyday life

Chronology and reality cast aside,

For there is nothing here, in my city of night,

but the whirling glass fragments of my entire being;

completely, incomprehensibly shattered.

Yet laid out in perfect understanding of all that defines me.

As I stir from my self-wrought demons,

the phantasms grasping the corners of my vision,

their wispy fingers silently leadening my eyelids

 and beckoning me back into the shadows.

I disentangle myself from ivory clouds,

To dive into the current of waking life.

I return to die in the evening,

Only to be reborn in the morn.

For what is sleep but a temporary death,

Dreams but mirages of what we have lost

and have yet to achieve.

As I return to life each morning,

I decline to stay and linger,

In the ersatz reality of sleep.

For I’ll all the time in the world to dream,

When my soul is no longer mine to keep.