Dark Days — a poem of picking yourself up and starting again.
The dark days
The black, brown, and beige days
Grey glum days
The down disquiet days
The days when melancholy restlessness ebbs into the pervasive atmosphere of my being
The days of struggle, nothing but sadness, and discontent.
Bereft, I wear the mask that says I’m fine, with a smile and a laugh at things that aren’t even funny.
But with a torn and bleeding heart, the weeping and screaming that lies within bounce echoes of woe and solitude around inside my mind like a caged bird desperate to flee.
The stickiness of walking through the day is like swimming in a pool of molasses with a heaviness that heaves a slow monotonous effort seeping life force from my body.
The other side of the mire so far in the distance each step a mountainous effort as never getting there seems more real than the sun coming up tomorrow.
These are the days when time has no meaning and distraction from the moment-to-moment ticking of it is ever-present.
Knowing this will pass no matter how long it takes is the only pinpoint of light at the end of the long tunnel stretched out before me.
Seeing that light, that’s hope, knowing it will grow, widen, and brighten gives a small rise to optimism. Assuage and calm can be claimed by peering out from within the imprisoned walls of angst.
That is unless turning away from it and sinking further into the winter chill and darkness inside and settling there beckons and digs deep roots into the abyss of some strange kind of unknowingness.
Revelling in the thorny forest of vines and shadows. The call beckons our descent with a kind of stillness of silent screams, rumblings that ignite into tears and fatigue as though giving up is a release of unmet emotions like driftwood tossed about in an ocean that never quite reaches the shore.
The ebb and flow of the water swishing around my ankles cools the heat of despair and beseeches me to gaze upward toward a sun shining so brightly, glinting, glistening with dancing light from wave top to wave top as far as my laden eye can see to the horizon of a new day looming. The bringer of the dawning of a new day speaks of wisdom and life, far in the distance as the warm glow over the crest of the biggest wave, I see it, somewhere, somehow, I begin again and spin a new web.
